41 pages • 1 hour read
Baldassarre CastiglioneThe Book of the Courtier
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1528A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Renaissance Humanism and the Modern Man
The Book of the Courtier remains a seminal text that shaped the definition of the ‘Renaissance man’. Read throughout Europe, the book had a profound impact on the cultural consciousness, becoming the model of an ideal man. It laid out the rules of political and social etiquette for a male courtier.
The Book of the Courtier’s influence spread to England after Thomas Hoby translated the book into English in 1555. Scholar Gabriel Harvey compared his contemporary, Sir Philip Sidney, convincingly with Castiglione’s ideal courtier. Bembo’s discourse on the topic of divine love and beauty are echoed in Sidney’s poem Astrophel and Stella. Sidney, a successful diplomat, wrote about the sophisticated deceptions necessitated by political life in The Defense of Poesy.
Imitation, whether of Renaissance humanists such as Petrarch and Boccaccio, or The Book of the Courtier, was the dominant mode in Early Modern society. The courtier weaponized literacy and learning, supplanting knightly heraldry with diplomacy and a keen eye for aesthetics. The poet and the courtier are thus intrinsically connected through the notion of decorum. A strong grounding in the classics, and rhetoric in particular, was essential to court life. Literary life was integral to political success, and the contentious figure of the upwardly mobile courtier-poet embodied all of these issues.
Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster (1570) advises the English gentleman that studying the Courtier was preferable to learning decorum on a tour of actual Italian courts. The Book of the Courtier became shorthand for the kind of humanist scholar who embodied both erudition and ease: “He will be understood by all, since lucidity can go hand-in-hand with elegance […] Then again, he should not hesitate to coin words altogether, and make use of novel figures of speech” (78). The courtier as imitator did not escape critique however. Ben Jonson parodied such posturing ruthlessly in his comedy Every Man out of his Humour (1598).
Deception and Artifice
Writing about the idealized courtier, Castiglione hovers between two political writers, Niccolo Machiavelli and Sir Thomas More.
Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513 as a handbook for Italian princes, specifically Leonardo de Medici. It was published about a decade before Castiglione’s enquiry into the nature of the perfect courtier. In contrast with the conservatism Castiglione displays in The Book of the Courtier, Machiavelli is notorious for his intention to represent reality over imagination. And, for Machiavelli, there is danger lurking behind pretense because “one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.”
In contrast, Castiglione proclaims, “under the cloak of pleasure, no matter what the time, or place, or pursuit, the courtier will always achieve his objective” (189). Indeed, The Book of the Courtier’s representation of the court of Urbino is dressed up for posterity. For instance, in successive drafts of The Book of the Courtier, much of the bawdiness of the court is removed. In a subsequent version produced in 1584 by Castiglione’s son Camillo, the jokes about priests are amended and references to Fortune edited out.
More’s political satire Utopia, published in England in 1551, redresses the kind of posturing that is so essential to The Book of the Courtier. Castiglione clearly idealized the assembled cast of courtiers, some of whom, Giuliano de Medici and Guidobaldo Montefeltro, for example, were less well received. Bembo’s speeches about Platonic love and Christian doctrine are so grandiose as to occasionally appear insincere. The Utopian More (as distinguished from the author himself in a typically Early Modern layering of irony) laments that even philosophers must engage in such insincerity. More’s Utopia is a parodic enactment of Plato’s Republic, where the exoticism of the island reveals that utopia is unrealistic. While for Castiglione the courtier at least has a plan up his sleeve, More borders on a kind of nihilism: There is nothing beneath the mask of artifice.
Where More’s tone is satirical, Machiavelli’s tone is more realistic, yet of the two men, it was More who was ultimately executed for his beliefs, following a refusal to bend his religious beliefs to those of the state. Refusal to submit to the Oath of Supremacy, acknowledging the king as the head of the Church of England landed him on the scaffold in 1535, a somewhat Christ-like termination to a brilliant career in British parliament, during which he had held the highest office, bar king, of Lord Chancellor. Yet More’s death was not for want of diplomacy. More’s career was replete with ironic participation in the pageantry of deception that was political life.
