The Venetian courtesan has long captured the imagination as a female symbol of sexual license, elegance, beauty, and unruliness. What then to make of the cortig

Veronica Franco (whose life is featured in the motion picture Dangerous Beauty) was a sixteenth-century Venetian beauty, poet, and protofeminist. This collectio

My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman Emperor’s army blew a

During the course of the nineteenth century, a small group of women rose from impoverished obscurity to positions of great power, independence, and wealth. In d

A passionate encounter in Paris leads a rake to reform his ways in this Regency romance of forbidden desire and secret identities. It’s been more than three m