Courtesan Meaning: The Word and What Survives of It

Courtesan is one of the few words in this world that arrives with a history attached. It is also one of the most loosely used, and the gap between what it once described and what it signals on a listing today is worth understanding before you use it about anyone.

What the word means

A courtesan is a woman who had sexual relationships with wealthy or powerful men in exchange for money, property or position, but as an ongoing arrangement rather than a transaction, and with an expectation that she was cultured, educated and worth talking to.

That last part is the whole distinction. A courtesan was paid for her company in the fullest sense, and the sex was one part of an arrangement that also involved conversation, wit, music, politics and being seen with.

Where it came from

From the Italian cortigiana, the feminine of cortigiano, courtier. Literally, a woman of the court.

The word entered English in the sixteenth century, already carrying the sense it has now. The joke buried in the etymology is that a male courtier attended the court and a female one attended the courtiers, and everybody understood the difference perfectly well.

Renaissance Venice made it a recognised position. The cortigiana onesta, the honest courtesan, was educated, often published, and moved in circles closed to almost every other woman of the period. Veronica Franco, who died in 1591, was a Venetian courtesan and a poet whose work is still in print.

London had its own

The English version peaked in the Regency and Victorian periods and it was thoroughly public.

Harriette Wilson published her memoirs in 1825 and offered her former lovers the chance to be left out for a fee. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have answered “publish and be damned”, which may or may not be exactly what he said, but the book appeared and it sold enormously.

Catherine Walters, universally known as Skittles, was the last of the great Victorian courtesans. She rode in Hyde Park at a fixed hour and crowds gathered on Rotten Row to watch her do it. She was, in the most literal sense, famous for being seen.

That world sat in the same square mile the market still occupies. Mayfair and the streets around Hyde Park were where it happened, which is a longer continuity than most people realise. What happened to London’s visible sex trade covers the rest of that history.

What it means on a listing today

Almost always one thing: an expensive booking, presented as more than an hour.

Used honestly it points at longer bookings, dinner dates, travel and social occasions, with someone who can genuinely carry an evening in company. Used as branding, which is more often, it means the rate is high and the photographs are good.

Neither is dishonest exactly. It is simply a positioning word rather than a service, and it belongs in the same family as elite, exclusive and VIP: read it as a price signal and judge the listing on everything else. What high class actually buys takes that argument through properly.

The listings where the word would fit are the high class ones and the longer social bookings, which is where you will mostly see it.

Courtesan, escort, mistress

• Escort: the current, neutral, working term. A booking of a defined length at a stated rate. What an escort actually is.
• Courtesan: historically an ongoing arrangement with one wealthy patron, not a series of bookings. Today, mostly a register rather than a role.
• Mistress: two entirely separate meanings, and context decides. Historically the courtesan side of it; on a listing today it means domination, which is a different thing altogether.

Should you use it

About yourself, if it fits, by all means. About someone else, only if she uses it about herself.

Some escorts describe themselves as courtesans deliberately, and mean it as a statement about how they work rather than a claim about their rates. Others find it affected. There is no way to know which from outside, and the safe word is the one on her own profile.

Read how a booking actually works if the vocabulary is what has been holding you up, because none of it is as formal as the language suggests.