The Book of the Courtier (1528)

I had to read this for a graduate class. Some of it was interesting, but the Renaissance style of rhetoric is just so drawn out. It gets old fast. It's a great resource for teaching students about the values of the court system, though. ( )

This "entertaining comedy of manners" might read like it's entirely fiction, but in fact took place over the course of four evenings, beginning as game between about 30 people, some quite famous in history. The game is suggested by Frederico Fregoso, and the aim is to describe the perfect courtier and courtier lady. Through anecdotes and personal experience, the players imagine everything from looks, to social skills, to sportsmanship, to sense of humor, to loyalty and to intelligence, all the while cracking jokes and taking witty jabs at one another. However, despite being members of the aristocracy, the game has a rocky start as the characters disagree on whether or not the perfect courtier should be of noble birth. This brief dispute is important to note. Almost as though it were an unintentional hint towards the major social issues that future aristocracy will be wrestling with one hundred years later. But admitting that no one is perfect, noble or not, the players are free in their opinions, so that the reader gets to know each character through their contribution to the game. The reader also realizes that many of the values, rules of civility and favored traits that we hold today have changed very little or none at all. This is the most fascinating aspect of this work. But even if you aren't interested in the historic value of this work, it's still stands on it's own as a delightful classic. ( )

Several centuries ago, writing was simpler and more direct. Even though the sentences were longer, the word choice and meaning were always precise. This book is a Socratic exploration about greatness, framed as the recollection of a discussion held at court sometime in the early 1400's. Various characters discuss what traits are most important for those who would comprise a prince's court. Included in these virtues are grace, health, knowledge of arms, candor, trust, and beauty. All of these are explained through clever dialogue that invokes a sense of the 15th century and their appreciation of the classics. My favorite excerpt: "I have discovered a universal rule which seems to apply more than any other in all human actions or words: namely, to steer away from affectation at all costs, as if it were a rough and dangerous reef, and (to use perhaps a novel word for it) to practice in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless." ( )

"He [SJ] said the best book ever written upon good breeding grew up at the little court of Urbino -- Il Cortegiano by Castiglione." Boswell's Journal for October, 1773.

The Book of the Courtier

There really was a Camelot. But it was in Italy, Urbino in northern Italy to be exact, in the 1500s. Perched on top of a couple of hills in the region Le Marche, Urbino was ruled by the Montefeltro family. From 1444 to 1482 Federigo de Montefeltro skillfully steered his tiny domain through the rough storms of Italian Renaissance realpolitik. Federigo was a successful soldier of fortune yet maintained one of the largest libraries in Italy, spoke Latin, read Aristotle, helped orphans and in general earned the love of his people. He built a beautiful fairy-tale palace and had Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca decorate it.

His less fortunate son Guidobaldo inherited this charming and well-run dukedom. Guidobaldo married the cultivated Elisabetta of the Gonzaga family from Mantua. He was an invalid and not made of his father’s stern military stuff. A victim of the brilliant military campaigns of Cesare Borgia that so enchanted Machiavelli, Guidobaldo was temporarily deposed. When the Borgias (Cesare and his father Pope Alexander VI) died, the people of Urbino rose up, drove out Borgia’s soldiers and cheered Guidobaldo and Elisabetta upon their return.

For the next few years the court of Elisabetta and Guidobaldo was the most beautiful, enlightened, genteel place on earth. They attracted musicians, scholars and artists. Conversation was honed into a fine art. Into this paradise strode our Lancelot, Baldasare Castiglione, a diplomat descended from minor Italian nobility. He loved Elisabetta, but as far as we know the devotion remained platonic

It is because of Castiglione that we believe we have a sense of what the court of Montefeltro was like, or at least how they would have like to have been remembered. His “The Book of the Courtier” (Il Cortigiano) painstakingly analyzes the attributes of a gentleman through conversations (probably highly idealized) of refined visitors to Urbino.

It’s a long, slow, but thoroughly enjoyable book. It is a window into the renaissance mind. It does not describe how the Italians of the sixteenth century were, Machiavelli and Cellini are probably more useful there. But it tells how they wanted to be. The book was read and studied by nobility all over Europe.

It’s also how I wanted them to be. Urbino is one of my favorite places. It’s a crowded student city now. But on a quiet morning when only a few people are about and the sun has made its way over the hills from the Adriatic, I can imagine that I can see the ghosts of Elisabetta and Guidobaldo walking on the cobbled streets outside their beautiful palace. Fussy, snobbish, yet kind and gentle Castiglione and his wonderful book help make that fantasy more real. ( )