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Saturday, November 4. 2017

The Book of the Courtier

Book review: The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione


It begins: 



 On a chilly evening in early March 1507, high in the Apennine Mountains of northern Italy, a group of cultivated gentlemen and ladies sit around the fire in the audience chamber of the Duchess of Urbino discussing the qualities of the perfect courtier.


Such is the setting of one of the most celebrated books of the Italian Renaissance, The Book of the Courtier (Il libro del cortegiano) by Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), which was an international best-seller for a century after its first publication in 1528. The author, a minor nobleman from Mantua, was a humanistically-educated diplomat who served at the courts of northern Italy for most of his life, ending his career in Spain as Pope Clement VII’s nuncio to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V...


Posted by The Barrister in History at 15:38 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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Those cultivated people did not pass on their civilization to the current generation. The Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Rockefeller, Clinton and Bush families are beginning to remind me of the same problem here.
#1 indyjonesouthere on 2017-11-04 17:11 (Reply)
If Baldassare Castiglione had been a 20th century U.S. infantryman, his nickname would have been Badass.
#2 BillH on 2017-11-05 10:37 (Reply)
DH will find this under the Christmas tree this year ! Thank you for bringing it to my attention!

However, I have over the years developed a keen dislike for any anyone who claims to be enchanted with the "Renaissance". The extraordinary self regard which defined the hippie generation, and those generations who followed who think of themselves as "agents of change" leading the second renaissance disgusts me.
99% of those faculty members in today's colleges who encourage students to protest think of themselves as bringing about change "just like the Renaissance".
#3 faculty wife on 2017-11-05 10:52 (Reply)
I spent a year in Berserkeley as a hippie dropout eco-activist. I will never forget hearing two middle aged professionals agreeing that in the future, circa-1970 Berserkeley would be regarded in the same vein as the Renaissance. They were NOT talking about the Nobel laureates on the Berkeley faculty. They were talking about the Berserkeley hippies and activists.

Even back then I considered that claim to be conceited BS. As the decades go by, the that claim becomes more and more fatuous. Progressives do not tend towards humility.
#3.1 Gringo on 2017-11-05 16:29 (Reply)

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