Sarah Dunant "In the Company of the Courtesan"

The word courtesan has come to be synonymous with escort, call girl, mistress. But in its original context, a courtesan was a well-compensated companion to socially prominent European men of the Renaissance. Sarah Dunant's novel In the Company of the Courtesan takes us to Venice in the early 1500s, where we meet a 25-year-old courtesan named Fiammetta and the dwarf, Bucino, who is her pimp.