Case Studies
Cultural Exchange
Courtesy and conduct-oriented texts predated 1500, though it is widely considered that early modern writing on manners “achieve[d] a complexity and sophistication unequalled in the medieval past.”[1] The rise of the courtesy book as a popular European genre was propelled by the symbiotic processes of translation and cultural exchange. There is a clear coincidence between the popularization of courtesy and conduct books, the invention of printing, and the rise of vernacular languages in early modern Europe. The earliest Renaissance courtesy books, even if they were written for specific regional and linguistic audiences, were swiftly translated into numerous European languages. Indeed, such books rapidly travelled beyond the borders of the places in which they were written.
The birthplace of the courtesy book was High-Renaissance Italy, with Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528) the best-known and most enduring of the early courtesy books. This book and its European publishing history bear witness to the prestige accorded to Italian culture in the sixteenth century — a pre-eminence which was further consolidated by the publication of Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo (1558) and Stefano Guazzo’s The Civil Conversation (1574) in the following decades. Together, this triad of Italian courtesy texts travelled the European continent, providing a template for subsequent authors of conduct.
Over the course of the next few centuries, however, the cultural balance would shift. France overtook Italy as the hub of cultural authority in continental Europe by the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth century popular English writing in many genres came to be translated into other European languages, often transiting via French translations. Despite the increasingly important role played by state structures in geopolitics, the European translation and dissemination of these books show that it is problematic to link discourse about the (optimal) behaviour of citizens of the elite and middling ranks to questions of national identity per se. One of our aims is therefore to focus on the fraught relation between the emergence and consolidation of national identities and the production, translation, and dissemination of courtesy and conduct books in early modern Europe.
[1] Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (London: Yale University Press, 2018), p. 15.
Example: The Courtier
Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano [The Courtier], widely acknowledged as the first early modern courtesy book, was completed around 1516 and revised up until its publication in 1528. Castiglione himself died just a year later, too soon to see the strong influence of his book on continental literary culture. For The Courtier was a book which travelled, launching the courtesy book tradition both in the Italian and French courts and entering English print culture. As well as English, the book was translated into Spanish (1534), French (1537), German (1565), and Polish (1566). In order to ensure widespread dissemination across European courts and institutions, it was also translated into Latin in 1561. Copies of the book are present in libraries in many countries, including Portugal, Hungary, Sweden, and Switzerland. Within less than forty years of its original publication, Castiglione’s courtesy book had made an indelible mark on Western and Eastern Europe.
Thomas Hoby’s English translation of The Courtier was published in 1561. As with every translation, Hoby’s was not exact. Even the paratextual material of the 1561 edition evinces the differences between continental print culture, and the newly vitalized genre of courtesy literature in England. If we compare Hoby’s English title-page to the original Italian, we can see that the paratextual apparatus of the English edition was already marketing The Courtier as a self-help book — an emphasis on autonomous self-fashioning far less visible in the original edition. Highlighting the indispensability of The Courtier as a font of behavioural advice, the title page of Hoby’s English translation describes the book as “Very necessary and profitable for yonge Gentilmen and Gentilwomen abiding in Court, Palaice or Place”.
The year 1588 saw another important development in the book’s history, with the publication of John Wolfe’s trilingual edition of The Courtier. This trilingual edition features a remarkable mise-en-page in which Italian, French, and English are arranged as adjacent columns of text. Wolfe’s edition at once promotes the value of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic exchange, and subtly distinguishes the English vernacular and culture from its Italian or European counterparts. From the High-Renaissance Italy that was heir to Castiglione’s original Il Cortegiano to the trilingual Courtier which shows in graphic terms the English engagement with Continental courtesy discourse, Castiglione’s book is an emblematic example of the mobility and evolution of conduct books in early modern Europe.