IN THE COURTESAN's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon describe the genesis of their project as the insight that the Italian courtesans they studied “were indices of deeper, and wider, cultural phenomena,” which led them to wonder whether this was true of other courtesan cultures. Collaboration with scholars across disciplines led them to the conclusion that courtesanship, though not a “universal phenomenon,” was recurrent, and, confirming their initial insight, they found that the conditions that caused courtesan cultures around the globe to thrive or perish were always “intimately bound up with the status of courtesans as bearers of artistic traditions and the ways the arts are pressed into service as shapers of culture.”

Our purpose in this chapter is to explore the absence of a genuine courtesan culture in France. The kingdom valued female participation in politics and social life, yet no discrete and acknowledged category of “educated, creative and skilled” women who engaged “in relatively exclusive exchanges of artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons”— to borrow Feldman and Gordon's definition of a courtesan— has ever existed there. Purely transactional sexual relations from the medieval into the early modern and modern ages were matter-of-factly acknowledged. However, despite their verifiable extra-conjugal romantic liaisons, the cultivated noblewomen who lived with and served the queen cannot be considered courtesans: they did not trade in sex, although under Catherine de Medici (1519– 1589) they were accused of promiscuity, inciting gossip within and beyond the royal court. Nor were the “kept women” of the demimonde from the middle of the eighteenth-century courtesans in Feldman and Gordon's sense, lacking the education that would have made them capable of elevated conversation.

To understand this absence, a comparative approach such as Feldman and Gordon’s— which this volume on global queenship presupposes— seems especially apt, revealing the key similarities and differences that clarify our object of study. In what follows, then, we juxtapose the early modern French queen's court with the Japanese Ôoku (大Г), the “great interior” within the Edo palace during the Tokugawa period (1603– 1867) that housed the hundreds of refined, educated, and musically trained women, including the shogun's consort and his concubines, associated with the shogun's court.