The book of the Courtesan: Three alternate portraits of late Renaissance life (Fernando de Rojas, Francisco Delicado, Pietro Aretino, Spain, Italy)

Fernando de Rojas' Celestina, Francisco Delicado's Retrato de la Loc&dotbelow;&dotbelow;¸ana Andaluza, and Pietro Aretino's Ragionamenti are unusual male-authored Renaissance novels: each has a woman, a courtesan, as its protagonist and one of its most prominent and outspoken voices. In each, the figure of the courtesan functions as an ambivalent critic of one or more aspects of the society that has at once created and marginalized her. This dissertation explores the shared features of the three courtesan voices, as well as their authors' possible motivations in choosing them.; Some theoretical questions addressed are the degree to which it is appropriate to apply modern theoretical approaches such as feminism to Renaissance writing; whether such thing as a "feminine text" or "woman's language" exists in any literature, and might therefore be relevant to these examples; and what common traits exist in works such as these, where a male author writes a female protagonist. Study of the historical context reveals a common trait of the real-life courtesan poets of the Renaissance and their fictional sisters: their tendency to critique society from their position just within its margins, reimagining some of its overarching male-authored ideas to better express their opinions, but without abandoning those ideas entirely.; In the Celestina, the courtesan protagonist undermines from within the prevailing love philosophy of her universe, courtly love. Her socially and spiritually ambiguous role may reflect her converso author's identification with her place on the margins of the society whose assumptions she challenges. Lozana reworks the image of Celestina herself, and the larger social pattern of oversimplifying the question of what is good, beautiful and desirable in women. Lozana's portrait also more broadly represents a culture as ambiguously good and beautiful as the courtesan herself. In Aretino's Ragionamenti, most clearly, the courtesan as grotesque parody of the courtier exemplifies the author's feeling of marginalization, his disgust with many Renaissance ideals. Each novel's morally ambiguous, first-person criticism of the very structures which sustain the protagonist calls to mind the picaresque, here identified as the courtesan novels' most famous descendant.