One of the more insightful travellers was Thomas Hoby. Born in 1530, Hoby began his studies in 1545 at Cambridge and continued them in Strasbourg and Padua. In the summer of 1549 he toured around Italy, venturing to other university cities such as Florence and Bologna before heading south to Naples and then on to Sicily. He later wrote up his experiences. The authenticity of his account is open to question; he drew heavily on a book by Leandro Alberti, which provided details with which he could embellish his picture of Italy. Still, his knowledge of Italian culture was deep, and it enabled him to translate Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), a key work in establishing the importance of the arts in shaping the identity of the social elite.
Hoby was a shrewd participant in all areas of aristocratic life. Knighted for his diplomatic services, he died aged thirty-six, before he could fulfil his potential. But he is representative of a certain kind of sixteenth-century Englishman: cultivated and proud, well-connected and adventurous. In the royal courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, taste and learning were highly valued. This was especially true in the reign of Elizabeth. She savoured ceremony and creativity, and the Elizabethan courtier was a glittering all-rounder, a man of thought and of action, ornamented with accomplishments. The model for such figures was Italian, and the most prized skills included a mastery of poetry, dancing and music. Hence our calling a polymath a ‘Renaissance man’. Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy distinguished between ‘many-sided men’ and the remarkable few who were ‘all-sided’: a society full of the latter resembled not a corporation but ‘a matter of art’.6 Cosmopolitan men such as Hoby and Sir Philip Sidney wanted to reproduce these conditions.
All the while much of Elizabethan England was delighting in cruel amusements: public executions, bear-baiting, cock-fighting. This is a side of Englishness that we are likely to recognize: a quickness to drop all pretence of decorous restraint and collapse delightedly into brawling pugnacity.
Imagine then that you are an Elizabethan living in a town, familiar with cruel amusements yet also with the sight of the occasional glittering all-rounder. What does your world feel like? In the street there are dogs and pigs, noisy as well as filthy. Unless you are rich, you are unlikely to be insulated from the din of musicians, traffic and your neighbours. You rely on casual scavengers and gunge-farmers to keep the streets free from the worst kinds of grime. Your property is narrow, sooty, dusty and probably also musty. You are certainly able to sleep in a bed – and regard the bedstead as your main domestic asset, though it is likely to smell and be riddled with fleas. Washing your linen is a great chore, and when you clean your body it is usually without water – a brush will do to dislodge lice. You are nevertheless sensitive to bad smells, especially the stink of cesspits and latrines; you use soap and perfume to mask your own odours, aniseed or cumin to freshen your breath. Light is a valuable resource; in the houses of all but the rich, there is a choice between having enough light and having enough warmth.
You live in a home without upholstery, in which the model for furniture is that of the church, where comfort does not matter. In fact, you probably have nothing better to sit on than a stool. Before the eighteenth century, not many chairs were upholstered or provided with cushions, and the kind of sprung padding we might expect of an armchair or sofa was not common until the Victorian era. The historian Keith Thomas writes that ‘People unused to upholstered furniture do not have a desire for it.’ But people who are used to it think un-upholstered furniture looks naked, spartan and primitive – or painfully fashionable. Certainly your Elizabethan surroundings will seem, to twenty-first-century eyes, alarmingly stark. Thomas provides a list of goods that were rare or non-existent in the early sixteenth century but common by the middle of the eighteenth. It includes sugar, tobacco, books, newspapers, clocks, pictures, curtains and glass drinking vessels.7
Yet there were luxuries on show. The best houses contained handsome carvings and tapestries, and at the richest tables the food was spread out in a thick carpet, coloured here and there with saffron or even gold leaf, washed down with wines from Gascony or the Rhineland. One’s person was to be similarly bedecked: some of the clothes worn by aristocrats were made of sable and cloth of gold, while velvet, satin and taffeta were all reserved for affluent folk.8 Fine dress was the sign of fine feelings, and clothes were used strategically, to heighten the authority of men (think of the familiar images of Henry VIII, for instance) and emphasize the most appealing physical traits of women (hence Henry’s displeasure when his bride-to-be Anne of Cleves wore a high-cut German dress). One historian says of the codpiece that it might ‘somewhat frivolously … be called the Renaissance man’s Wonderbra’.9 Inspiration for personal adornment could be drawn from far afield. Costume books began to circulate in the 1560s, providing images of people in their best outfits; a Venetian, Cesare Vecellio, produced a volume that contained 500 woodcuts showing forms of attire from all around the world.
For the courtly elite, the nature of excellence was presented in conduct books. Castiglione’s was one such work. In The Boke Named the Governour, his home-grown recipe for domestic and public competence, Sir Thomas Elyot suggested that prospective members of the ruling class should cultivate selflessness and dedicate themselves to personal development. He recommended chess, condemned games involving dice, and applauded the refreshing powers of music. Elyot’s ideal courtier is an impersonal figure, whose qualities include affability and mercy, courage and temperance – the last of these not always popular in the reign of Henry VIII. His later The Castle of Health provided further details about the correct diet and exercise regimen for a young nobleman; it includes surprising information, such as that all fruits are ‘noyfull’ (noxious) and often cause ‘putrified fevers’.
The written history of manners, inasmuch as it exists at all, tends to be the history of such books. The genre survives to this day. Classics in the field include The Whole Duty of Man, a collection of lessons about personal duties published in 1658 by the clergyman Richard Allestree, and the Scottish moralist James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766). Going further back, one might mention the educational treatise De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (published in 1530 and translated into English two years later), in which Erasmus preached piety and ‘outward bodily propriety’, and Stefano Guazzo’s La Civil Conversazione (1574), which emphasized that civility was not a matter of status but one of spiritual qualities expressed through habits. Guazzo’s book was not a guide to chitchat, whatever its title may suggest. He had in mind not merely talk, but the whole business of human interactions. Educated English readers latched on to his style, which mixed seriousness with an appetite for witty proverbs, and English authors pilfered his wisdom.
In between Erasmus and Guazzo came Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1558). Della Casa was a churchman but also worldly-wise, a patrician Florentine writing for an audience of public, active individuals. He advised his readers that when in company they should not clean their fingernails, read letters or fall asleep (the last for fear of waking up covered in sweat and slobber). He also counselled that one ought never to present a friend with something pungent and say, ‘Please smell how this stinks’; one’s impulse should instead to be to say, ‘Don’t smell this, because it stinks.’ Nor should you look in your handkerchief after blowing your nose, ‘as if pearls or rubies might have descended from your brain’.10 Della Casa’s main concern was how to avoid giving offence: don’t suck your teeth, hum when you have company, discuss at table wounds or disease, or point out to your friends disgusting things by the roadside.
None of these three works was written in English, but the ideas contained in them found significant English-speaking audiences. They offered a guide to life in broad terms, rather than just to some small corner of it. These conduct books’ modern counterparts are self-help guides, volumes such as The Rules (1995), in which Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider proffer ‘time-tested secrets f
or capturing the heart of Mr Right’ (for instance, ‘Be honest but mysterious’ and ‘Don’t rush into sex, wait at least three dates’). There is a difference between the two genres: conduct books are concerned with teaching norms of behaviour, whereas self-help, besides its obvious accent on improving performance, is more concerned with psychological norms – with eradicating existing patterns of thought and replacing them with more affirmative or tactically cunning ones. The audience for The Rules is plainly different from the audience for a book called La Civil Conversazione. Yet while the modern self-help guide may be less dignified and more ruthlessly pragmatic than the conduct books used by previous generations, the two kinds of writing share an instructional approach to personal development and achievement, as well as emphasizing individuality and the importance of appearances.
There are essentially two kinds of book in this whole field. There are books of practical advice: ‘Do this’, ‘Don’t do that’. And there are books that set out a theory of how we should behave. The former have tended to be written for a narrow audience (there is a tradition of parents producing works of this kind to aid their children), whereas the latter have tended to reach larger constituencies. The more abstract works of instruction can be philosophically profound, but mostly they appeal because their message is affirmative and banal.
In sixteenth-century England one of the more assertively practical programmes was Thomas Wolsey’s Eltham Ordinance of 1526. An attempt to reform the court of Henry VIII, its provisions were minute. For instance, the king’s barber was expected to be in attendance every day when he rose, with all his equipment ready – water, cloths, knives, combs, scissors – and was strictly instructed to avoid the company ‘of vile persons, or of misguided women’. Those in attendance in the king’s privy chamber were to be ‘loving together, and of good unity and accord’; if the king was absent when they expected him, they were not to ask why and should avoid ‘mumbling or talking of the King’s pastime’. Leftover candles were to be collected by nine o’clock in the morning, and failure to do so would be punished by the withholding of a week’s wages.
Impromptu guides to manners also passed around, and could be of great use to traders. Richard Chancellor, who commanded the first expedition of the Muscovy Company in 1555, explained the rituals of the Russian tsar’s court in a series of handwritten notes; these were an indispensable guide to the ins and outs of doing business in Russia. With their details of toasts and correct form at table, as well as their remarks about the importance of oaths and letters of introduction, Chancellor’s jottings are an early example of the notion that manners can be a business tool. But the deepest influence was exerted by writers who proposed philosophies of personal excellence. The two that stood out were Erasmus and Castiglione, and it is to them that we now turn.
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But who was the Renaissance man?
Modern notions of civility begin with Erasmus. His writings, elegant and accessible, preached the idea that training and practice were essential to making the most of one’s natural gifts. De Civilitate Morum Puerilium, published in 1530 and translated into English two years later, was aimed at young boys – and not just noble ones.1 It systematically explained how to do the right thing: how to stand and sit, bow, wear one’s hair (neat, but not shiny like a girl’s), behave in church (small talk is out of the question), lie in bed with a male companion (no stealing all the blankets) and project an air of modesty. Running through all this was an obvious concern with outward bodily propriety.
Erasmus’s guidelines were adopted by schools and widely copied. Much of what he wrote remains interesting, not least because it is often informed by an acute understanding of the relationship between behaviour and image. He advises against certain facial expressions: staring is a sign of inertia, a wide-eyed gaze indicates stupidity, furrowing the eyebrows makes you look cruel, puffing your cheeks out suggests disdain. The soul expresses itself through the eyes, so it is important to regulate the way you use them. Don’t neigh when you laugh, and avoid giggling at private jokes. Don’t intersperse your speech with little coughs, which hint at deceitfulness. Don’t stroke your face as if trying to wipe away your shame.
He also talks about matters that don’t tend to be publicly discussed any more. Ideally, you should expel snot into a cloth rather than wiping your nose on your clothes; if no cloth is to hand and you blow your nose using only your fingers, you should tread the snot into the ground rather than simply leaving it in open view. He suggests that if you sneeze when others are around you should turn aside – and remember that the sneeze may have temporarily impaired your hearing. If someone else sneezes, everyone should bless him scrupulously. At the time the usual response in polite English circles was immediately and quietly to say ‘Christ help’ (a forerunner of the still common ‘Bless you’); this type of practice had been around at least since ancient Greek society, in which sneezes were regarded as ominous, and stemmed from the belief that any interruption of the breath of life was dangerous, posing a threat to the sanctity of the head and its precious contents.
To a modern audience, the pleasures of Erasmus lie in such details. He is dismissive of people who snort and trumpet like elephants, but makes the point that one should not suppress natural, necessary bodily noises out of prissiness. He advises that a boy should keep his penis out of sight: ‘Revealing without need those parts of the body which nature has covered with modesty is to be completely avoided.’ Conversation at mealtimes is recommended; vomiting is regarded as much less offensive than elaborately trying to choke back vomit; one should cough to mask the passing of wind; and one should not greet others while they are urinating or defecating. Here there is a mixture of plain-spokenness and repugnance. Erasmus urges delicacy, yet also seems unsqueamish, as when he suggests that it is foolish (and dangerous) to try to hold back a fart. Above all, one should ignore other people’s faults, and ‘if a friend does something wrong without realizing it, and it seems important, then it’s polite to inform him of it gently and in private.’2
Castiglione is a different sort of guide, writing for a different audience. He is suave where Erasmus is sober. He concentrates on life outside the home, picturing a readership that is outgoing and – as his book’s title makes plain – courtly. This is not to say that The Book of the Courtier is a terribly good guide to the specifics of behaviour. Rather, it functions as a motivational work, urging the reader to sharpen his social intelligence. It was not enough to know how to behave; the correct forms of behaviour should be absorbed into the courtier’s being.
It was while serving as a courtier in Urbino, a community aglow with cultural activity, that Castiglione wrote The Book of the Courtier. It was published in 1528 in Venice, in an edition that today looks small: 1,030 copies. But there were almost sixty editions before 1600, as well as numerous imitations. Its reputation reached far; the prestige of Italian culture was percolating westward. Many foreigners read Castiglione in Italian, and there were soon versions in French, Spanish and German. In the eighteenth century The Book of the Courtier could be found in the libraries of gentlemen as far afield as Philadelphia. On its travels the text was often supplemented with generous notes, which helped make it seem more practically useful. Elements were cut, too; the historian Peter Burke mentions that the Polish version did away with all discussion of the arts, as the subject struck the translator as wholly irrelevant to his audience.
Although interpreted as a handbook and a moral treatise, The Book of the Courtier was also regarded as a work of nostalgic escapism and a defence of aristocratic values. The context in which Castiglione had written it was soon forgotten; he drafted a first version between 1513 and 1518, and then rewrote it in the 1520s, recalling as he did so a time closer to the start of the century, when Urbino had been peaceful rather than caught up in war. Castiglione, who had aspired to a life of happy and contemplative tranquillity, had instead found himself in a precarious society where diplomacy was essential to survival.
T
he book is set in Urbino, which is presented as a harmonious place. Organized in the form of a stylized discussion that takes place over four successive evenings, it idealizes gracious talk and its deft give and take. This structure allows Castiglione to present a variety of points of view; it makes the pursuit of truth feel like a game. Dexterity in speech is the mark of the accomplished courtier. We gather that a society in which social skills are the norm will be an oasis of calm in an otherwise vicious world. But those skills equip a man for a life beyond the oasis, where he will be surrounded by ambitious rivals scrambling for office and influence, and even in Castiglione’s Urbino there are traces of paradox, suspicion and duplicity. Opportunists get everywhere.
Castiglione builds up a picture of the courtier as a man of the world, multi-talented and scholarly, an athlete and a warrior, politically astute and self-reliant. Among the qualities he prescribes are affability, charm, honesty and modesty. A man with these traits is likely to be able to please his master and make him receptive to ideas. The perfect courtier is one whose accomplishment means he can always approach his master with confidence and be sure that even his most candid words are accepted and heeded. He is a manager, good at handling other people’s hubris. Granted, much of what Castiglione says makes this ideal figure sound glib. But crucially, although Castiglione emphasizes the value of being well-born, he says that education matters more than background. A person may be considered noble on account of some accident of birth, but true nobility is a state of mind – something that can be learned and indeed taught. Its distinguishing features have to be performed.
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