Lesson 1: Renaissance Venice

I am giving a course today to my historical writers' group and am sharing it here so others can enjoy, too. 

1. Your part
2. My intro
3. First resource for the course

1. Hello! 
Welcome to Lesson 1. Today we'll be studying the Venetian Renaissance -- the first place in the world that publishing really got going after the invention of Gutenberg's printing press.

We would all love to hear you say hello and say a little about who you are and what you're most interested in learning about today! It's a quick little course, but I'll accommodate all the requests I can. Renaissance Venice offers us so many rich topics -- the book business, banking, the inquisition, courtesans, libertines, commerce, multiculturalism, and the history of Venice itself, even.

2. Me:

I'm your instructor, Christa Bedwin. I have spent several years in Europe immersing myself (and my son) in its various cultures and peoples and traditions, and I write time travel romances with protagonists from two different places and times. I love contrasting cultures. I always write the historical part as accurately as I can, not just with facts and events, but with how people really thought and felt at that time. Sometimes cultures in the past or in other parts of the world have completely different cultural assumptions than our own, and that's what I love and I think can help us live better, gaining that perspective. (And some parts of their needs and wants and goals are exactly the same as modern folks!) 

In my paying work I've been a high school chemistry teacher, a chemist, a professional editor, a bellydance instructor, a baker, a logger, a jilleroo, and oh so many other things. Not uncommon for a writer I guess -- constant craving to live the lives of all my characters and try just everything from every angle! In my travels I've noticed that sometimes the hardest situations make the best stories later -- always a comfort at the time. 

My first time-travel novel, Caterina's Renaissance, sort of grew out of a time that I was living on a west coast island and couldn't get a date. I've always sorted of wanted a "Renaissance man" -- one who's learned, but physical... compassionate, musical, artistic, scientific...  After a trip to Italy, somehow I realized that the ideal boyfriend might be a man from Renaissance Venice. The commercial and cultural center of the world for a thousand years, it drew writers and poets, beauty and music and love and industry and invention, like nowhere else before or since.

There is nowhere else like Venice.


3. First Resource for this course:
Dangerous Beauty, 1997, with Catherine McCormack 
a beautiful movie, which you can purchase or rent from YouTube or elsewhere online:
Hopefully this link works for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amqmS98FhHU

It's a gorgeous, sumptuous movie with all the beauty of Venice and the Renaissance. It follows the true life story of Veronica Franco, one of history’s most extraordinary women and an honest courtesan who rose to extraordinary political heights simply on the power of her intelligence, grace, and character.
I think it’s a lovely thing to have playing in the background to be “in the mood” for this course, if you have time. 


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