The Fortunes of the Courtier

The European Reception of Castiglione's Cortegiano

Peter Burke

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745665849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This book aims to understand the different readings of Castiglione's Cortegiano or Book of the Courtier from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.

1

Tradition and Reception

In the dedication to the translation of the book which he published in 1724, Robert Samber wrote that ‘The Courtier was too great to be confined within the narrow limits of Italy … nor was it sufficient that he was read, loved and admired by the most celebrated courts in the Universe, unless, in order to become more familiar to them, they might dress him in the habit proper to each country.’ In similar fashion the political theorist Sir Ernest Barker once remarked that ‘it would be a fascinating study to examine comparatively the different national tinctures’ to Castiglione’s ideal.¹

This essay is an attempt to respond to these challenges. Its primary aim is to reconstruct the local and personal meanings of an international movement, thus putting bibliographical and sociological minutiae to use in answering broad general questions. I shall be emphasizing the elements in Castiglione’s text which appealed to readers most widely or for the longest time, notably the discussion of grace and sprezzatura, while attempting to avoid reducing the many-sidedness of the dialogue, in the manner of some of its sixteenth-century editors, to a few simple propositions.

The period on which the book concentrates is essentially the first century after the Courtier was published in 1528, although the concluding chapters will discuss references to the text in later periods. The area with which I am concerned is essentially Europe, despite occasional references to readers further afield, from India to the Americas. My strategy has been to concentrate on readers outside Italy, because the greater the cultural distance from the author’s milieu, the more clearly the process of active reception is revealed. Although this was not the original intention, I have found myself paying particular attention to Castiglione’s reception in England, and hope that the close examination of a single culture, more or less from within, will compensate for the dangers inherent in any broad international survey.

The breadth is necessary because I hope to make a small contribution to the understanding of the ‘Europeanization of Europe’, in other words the gradual integration of European culture over the centuries.² I shall therefore try to look beyond the Courtier, using the text as a case-study to explore three broader topics: the reception of the Renaissance outside Italy, the history of the book, and the history of value-systems.

The Reception of the Renaissance

From the time of Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), if not before, historians have been studying this period as a time of changing attitudes to the self and to others. Burckhardt characterized the new trend as ‘the development of the individual’, noting both the rivalry and the self-consciousness of the artists and writers of the period, as revealed, for example, in their self-portraits and autobiographies.

More recently, the emphasis has changed. In the wake of studies such as Erving Goffman’s on what he called ‘the presentation of self in everyday life’, leading figures of the Renaissance such as the emperor Maximilian and Thomas More have been studied from the point of view of their self-presentation, ‘self-fashioning’ or Selbststilisierung.³ These studies of major figures provoke the question whether or not their lead was widely followed at the time. Castiglione’s dialogue looks very much like a guide to self-fashioning, so it may be of interest to examine responses to it in the Renaissance, not only in Italy but also abroad.

This point about responses has wider implications. Traditional accounts of the diffusion of the Renaissance have often presented it as a triumphal progress through Europe in which one country after another succumbed to the spell of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Pico della Mirandola, Ariosto, Machiavelli and other leading artists, writers and thinkers.⁴

There are two basic weaknesses in accounts of this type. The first is the assumption that Italians alone were active and creative at this time, while other Europeans were passive, mere recipients of ‘influence’, an originally astrological term which has often been employed rather uncritically by intellectual historians.⁵ The interest shown by some fifteenth-century Italians in paintings from the Netherlands shows that they at least noticed the originality of foreign artists.

The second weakness in the conventional story of the diffusion of the Renaissance is to identify what was ‘received’ with what was ‘given’. Although the term ‘tradition’ originally meant ‘handing down’, it is difficult to deny that changes often occur in the course of transmitting concepts, practices and values. Traditions are constantly transformed, reinterpreted or reconstructed – whether this reconstruction is conscious or unconscious – to fit their new spatial or temporal environments. The classical tradition, for example, was reconstructed in this way in the Middle Ages. Homeric heroes such as Achilles were transformed into knights, the poet Vergil was turned into a necromancer, Jupiter (on occasion) into a scholar, Mercury into a bishop, and so on.⁶

If we shift our focus from traditions to individuals, we will often find them practising a form of bricolage, in other words selecting from the culture surrounding them whatever they find attractive, relevant or useful, and assimilating it (consciously or unconsciously) to what they already possess. Some individuals are more attracted by the exotic than others, but all domesticate their discoveries by a process of reinterpretation and recontextualization. In other words, readers, listeners and viewers are active appropriators and adapters rather than passive receivers.⁷

It should be added that the appropriation they practise is not random but has a logic of its own. This logic of appropriation is often shared by a social group, which may therefore be described as an ‘interpretive community’, or on occasion as a ‘textual community’ in which a book is used as a guide to the group’s thought and action.⁸ Such notions of community can be misleading, but all the same it is difficult to do without them. They are dangerous insofar as they lead us to forget or minimize individual differences of opinion, but they remain indispensable in reminding us of what is shared.

This constant process of reinterpretation and recontextualization in one sense erodes tradition, but in another sense maintains it by ensuring that it continues to meet the needs of different groups. If for some reason this process of gradual reinterpretation is impeded, a pressure for more radical change or ‘reform’ may build up. The cultural movement we call the ‘Reformation’, for instance, is a dramatic instance of a radical reinterpretation of a Christian tradition.

It follows from the argument presented in the previous paragraphs – an argument which to support adequately would require a book much longer than this one – that the conventional distinction between ‘invention’ and ‘diffusion’ should be viewed as a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. Invention itself is best seen as a process of creative adaptation – the printing press an adaptation of the wine press, the novel as an adaptation of the epic, and so on.

In the case of the Renaissance, it may therefore be useful to abandon the idea of a simple ‘influence’ or ‘spread’ of new ideas and images from Florence outwards, and to ask instead what the ‘uses’ of Italy may have been for writers, scholars and artists in other parts of Europe, what was the logic of their appropriations, and why and how far new Italian forms or ideas were assimilated into everyday life and into indigenous traditions, from Gothic architecture to scholastic philosophy. To answer all these questions it is necessary to study the ways in which the recipients interpreted what they saw, heard or read. We have to pay attention to their perceptual ‘schemata’.⁹ We have to concern ourselves with what literary theorists have come to call their ‘horizons of expectation’.¹⁰

In short, cultural historians have something to gain by assimilating the still somewhat exotic notion of ‘reception’, using it to modify the traditional idea of tradition. In fact, the word, if not the notion, should not sound too unfamiliar to students of the Renaissance, since the term Rezeption first came into use to describe the spread of humanism and Roman law in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. In any case, the Renaissance debate on the nature of literary imitation (below, pp. 81–2) was concerned with one of the central issues in reception theory, that of the compatibility between tradition and innovation.

The study of the reception of texts raises some large problems. An ordinary working historian would be ill-advised to take sides in current controversies in the field of literary theory, and especially to pronounce on the ultimately metaphysical question whether the true or essential meaning of a text resides in the mind of the creator, in the work itself (which gradually reveals its meaning in the course of time) or in the responses of its readers.¹¹ All the same, there can be little doubt of the relevance of reception theory (concerned as it is with a temporal process), to the work of cultural historians in general and in particular to historians of the book.

The History of the Book

As a self-conscious approach to cultural history, the history of the book was developed in France in the 1960s, although, as often happens, the approach existed long before it was baptized. Two examples from the year 1910 should remind us that the present generation of historians was far from the first to be interested in this subject. Daniel Mornet made a quantitative study of the contents of 500 French libraries between 1750 and 1780, while Caroline Ruutz-Rees focused attention on the marginal annotations of a single Elizabethan reader, Gabriel Harvey, a name which will recur in these pages.¹²

Students of Machiavelli in particular have long been concerned with the variety of responses to his work inside and outside Italy, in England, France, Spain and elsewhere. They have paid particular attention to hostile responses to his notorious Prince, the banning and burning of the book, for example, and the denunciation of its author as a villain and an ‘atheist’. In some sixteenth-century contexts, so it turns out, Machiavelli was denounced not (or not only) for his own sake but as a symbol of Italian influence on England, France or Poland, or as an indirect way of attacking the ruler – Catherine de’ Medici, for example. Yet the condemnation of the author did not prevent more orthodox political theorists from adopting some of Machiavelli’s ideas, which they were careful to attribute to an ancient writer, Tacitus, rather than a modern one.¹³ Some foreign responses to the Courtier followed the same model, as we shall see.

As these examples suggest, there are a number of possible approaches to the history of the book, varieties of cultural history which have attracted many scholars in the last decade or so.¹⁴ One of these approaches concentrates on editions, their geography and chronology and the modifications made to the original text by editors and publishers. Another focuses on translations, adaptations and imitations of the original text. A third approach involves the examination of particular copies for underlinings and marginalia which reveal the responses of individual readers.¹⁵ With the rise of the history of reception, it was recently remarked, marginalia have become central.¹⁶ Finally, there is the study of library catalogues, auction catalogues, inventories and lists of subscribers in order to discover what kinds of people were interested in a particular book. All four methods will be utilized at some point in this essay. They all help to bridge the gap between the great books of the past and the...