Some developments in the courtesy manual after Castiglione

Abstract

No one working on courtesy manuals can be unaware of the difficulties in defining what such treatises were. Alongside specifically didactic manuals there flourished ironic accounts of life at court, sociological studies of class structure in the period after 1500, and other treatises which are no more than satires on social-climbing. Nevertheless those works, too, were read by the upwardly-mobile, hopeful of gleaning from them information on how to behave (or not to behave) in order to achieve self-promotion. The popularity of Ariosto's Satire, bizarrely considered by 1611 in England as an almanac, may be seen as typical of such a desire to learn from example and error, as well as to find wry amusement in another's predicament. Alexander Barclay's translation of Pius H's (1444) De curialium miseriis was an equally popular symptom throughout the sixteenth century. As provincial courts in Italy became concentrated in fewer major cities, and as natural forces in the great European courts favoured a centripetal tendency restricting the numbers of 'genuine' courtiers, minor noble houses, particularly in England (and in London), became mini-courts, often unconscious parodies of their formerly great predecessors. Courtly and courtesy manuals became simply hand-books for social, and thus economic and political, advancement.