Review by Choice Review
Migiel (Cornell Univ.) provides a close reading and critical analysis of 14 poems from 16th-century Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco's 25-poem collection Terze Rime, published under Franco's name in 1575. Migiel argues that Franco has too often been seen solely as a feminist icon, praised for her passionate defenses of herself, of courtesans, and of women in general. The poems analyzed here are a dialogic exchange with an unknown male author or authors, perhaps real ones or perhaps imagined by the poet. Whether they were written by Franco herself or by males does not really matter for Migiel's argument; she concentrates on poems Franco wrote in response to these, using them to illustrate the way Franco defines who she is, reacts to the way men treat her, and places herself within the tradition of Latin and Italian poetry. Migiel sees the poems as marked by more "ambivalence, uncertainty, and precariousness" (p. 19) than been been previously thought. Though Migiel's graceful translations of the poetry make the book accessible to those who do not read Italian, the book is meant primarily for specialists. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, emerita, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
