Like a hybrid of Dorothy Parker and Jennifer Lopez, a courtesan in Renaissance Italy used her brains and her body to enjoy the benefits of marriage -- companionship, property and financial stability -- without the stifling social constraints. She also replaced a man's wife on the social scene, since proper married women were sequestered from the sins of the world and kept prisoners in their own homes.

Courtesans were companions for bankers, princes, prelates and merchants. Known for their wit, charm and elegance, they palled around with the most important and powerful men of their day. They wrote novels, published poems and influenced politics, often delivering political messages from pillow to pillow. They also used sex, and they flaunted it in ways that married women could not. As the French traveler and writer Pierre de Brantome snidely commented in the 16th century, "Roman ladies copulate like bitches but are silent as stones."

While the heyday of courtesans was classical Greece, they've been in every culture, most notably Renaissance Italy and 18th century Japan. No one knows where the term comes from but it's closest to the male "courtier" which means "of the court," says Margaret Rosenthal, the author of "The Honest Courtesan: The Life of Veronica Franco." Franco is perhaps the best known courtesan of the Renaissance -- a hall-of-famer who greased relations between Venice and France by bedding the King of France, and whose life was depicted in the 1998 film "Dangerous Beauty."

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