I'm gonna shoot gaspar with a gun.

An old Italian book about how to be the perfect court gentleman isn't exactly easy reading, but it has its charms. This is written as a symposium or dialogue between friends that last across a series of evenings, debating what makes a man or woman perfect. Interesting especially for its portrayal of the war between the sexes (the exchanges between the bitter misogynists of the group and the women are amusing, and the misogynists by no means get the best of the women) and the image of a courtly culture that is quite different from our own, and yet familiar in many ways.

A book of hidden gems, but you have to wade through a lot of other, less interesting bits like 20 pages of jokes that do not hold up. Also, I did not realize when I picked this edition up at a used bookstore that I would be wading through early Modern English spelling.

Journey through history continues. Part of the charm in these memoirs is writing style of different periods. Oh woe!

When I opened this book today to attempt to review it, a bookmark fell out. It isn't a real bookmark but simply a leaflet I picked up in a gallery when I was in Northern Italy last September.
Reviewing the book now feels like finally closing the chapter on that trip.

I had set out for Italy with three books in my bag, one of which was this one. Although it is three months since I returned home, and although the other two books have been finished and reviewed months ago, this book has hung on, if not to my attention, at least to its place on my reading pile—though fifteen further books were finished in the meantime.

And so, as the December evenings got longer and darker, I forced myself to return to the [b:The Book of the Courtier|314582|The Book of the Courtier|Baldassare Castiglione|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328865424l/314582._SY75_.jpg|515272] and to the discussions by a group of Italian noblemen and women which Baldesar Castiglione has recorded in this book. The discussions took place over the course of four winter evenings in 1507, in the salon of the Duchess Elisabetta Montefeltro of Urbino on the occasion of a visit to the ducal palace by a group of dignitaries from Rome.

'Discussion' is not quite the right term perhaps. 'Disquisition' might suit better since there was a topic around which the discussion was centered, and rather than everyone being free to speak, certain people were called on to give long commentaries on the chosen subject. The subject was the Ideal Courtier, how he should behave, how he should dress, how he should converse, and how he should love. That final aspect lead to a discussion of the Ideal Lady. She was allowed to be witty but mostly she had to be coy, and especially, never to speak out of turn or call attention to herself in any way. Hmm...

What was interesting for me in this book, apart from the way it documents a particular moment in history, was the way it overlapped with other books I'd been reading, in particular Alison Cole's [b:Italian Renaissance Courts|33007228|Italian Renaissance Courts (Renaissance Art)|Alison Cole|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1479495330l/33007228._SX50_.jpg|53652266] which included sections on several of the people mentioned in Castiglione's book and which explained the relationship between the Montefeltros and the other noble families in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy.

The other main interest for me was the way the book echoed places I visited on my Italian trip. The bookmark I mentioned at the beginning was a leaflet I picked up when I visited the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche which is located in the Ducal Palace in Urbino where the conversations in this book took place.



So there I was, moving from one sumptuous room of the palace to another, viewing the art treasures in the Marche collection, when, around a corner and across a little corridor, I found myself entering the room that had belonged to Elisabetta, Duchess of Montefeltro. This was the salon in which the discussion of the Ideal Courtier took place more than 500 years ago. As I had read a third of the book at that stage, I was quite thrilled to be there. The focus of the room today is Raphael's 'La Muta' which is thought to be a representation of one of the Montefeltro noblewomen.



La Muta means the silent one—which fits well with the role of the women in this book. Speeches by women take up about 5 pages out of 350, and they are very short and always to the point. The rest of the book is taken up with long and involved speeches by men.

A further echo of my trip emerged in the final section of the book. castiglione mentions that although most of the people present in the discussions were dead by the time he published this account in 1528, the new Duke of Montefeltro, Francesco della Rovere, was still living. Francesco had been just a seventeen-year old in 1507 but he was nevertheless present at the discussions in Elisabetta's salon. He later married her niece, Eleanora Gonzaga of Mantua, who then became Duchess of Urbino. The day before I travelled to Urbino, I visited the Villa Imperiale in Pesaro—the elaborate summer residence that Francesco built for Eleanora. I didn't fully understand how significant that visit was until I came across the reference to Francesco and Eleanora in Castiglione's book. It was convergences like this that made reading this book memorable for me.

Fictionalised conversations by historic characters at the court of Urbino, Italy, 1507. The author his hiding behind these characters. Central focus on "grazia": amiable conduct, apparent carelessness, but with the purpose to flatter the lord. Interesting as an historic document, but rather dull to read, I'm afraid.

This first came out in 1526, and for those of us who can't read it in the original, there are various translations. The style is the old rhetorical conversation, which takes place in an ideal court scene of a small polity in Renaissance Italy.

It's a how-to for courtiers. Of course, it's not meant for just anybody. First of all, it's aimed at men, and second, Castiglione warns sternly, "I deem it necessary for him to be of noble birth."

This is a book of manners, and as such, gained wide popularity and influence across Europe, bolstering the sense that young aristocrats, in order to be considered truly civilized, must spend some time in Italy. It also forms a direct line of influence to the French honnete.

A pleasant read into the lives of the courtesans of the 1500s. Maybe the Scarlet Pimpernel read this book to get ideas. "Sink me, your tailors have betrayed you." This book is about the best way people should act among themselves.

Excellent discussion of what the ideal courtier would look like, circa 1510 or so, from the perspective of a lot of Italian gentlemen and women who entertain themselves of an evening with this sort of thought-provoking speculation and debate. Although fictionalized, the characters who undertake this discussion are all based on actual court figures with whom Castiglione was familiar, and the entirety reads more as a sort of philosophical treatise than actual fiction, however much the individual attributes or opinions of these persons may have been changed in the writing. The work begins by describing the attributes of the perfect courtier (mostly focusing on which virtues and social graces are important for him to have, and which ones are more important than others), then moves in the second section into a lengthy analysis of humor and how to incorporate it into your conversation in a pleasing manner. This part in particular I found overly long and tedious. The third section digresses into a discussion of a matching ideal court lady to pair with the courtier, and allows itself some considerable argument over the merits of women as compared to men, whether or not they can be as worthy of praise, etc, which was pretty fascinating as an insight into the 16th century mindset. The fourth section spends some time discussing the occupation of the courtier and the attributes of the ideal prince (whom the imaginary courtier is imagined to be instructing), before veering into another argument about whether it is appropriate for old men to fall in love. This debate morphs into a spiritual lyric in praise of intellectual love which is poetic and very moving, albeit a bit removed from the original intention of the work. As a window into sixteenth-century thought and manners among the elite of Italy, it's very interesting, although it skims the surface for the most part and won't give details of good manners in the way of a manners-guide or anything of that sort. This is a book that deals with theory, but you can read a lot between the lines if you want to.