The Book of the Courtier PDF Download

Author: Baldassarre Castiglione
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Author: Peter Burke
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745665845
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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

Author: conte Baldassarre Castiglione
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Courtesy
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Author: W.R. Albury
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317169484
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (Il libro del cortegiano, 1528), a dialogue in which the interlocutors attempt to describe the perfect courtier, was one of the most influential books of the Renaissance. In recent decades a number of postmodern readings of this work have appeared, emphasizing what is often characterized as the playful indeterminacy of the text, and seeking to detect inconsistencies which are interpreted as signs of anxiety or bad faith in its presentation. In contrast to these postmodern readings, the present study conducts an experiment. What understanding does one gain of Castiglione’s book if one attempts an early modern reading? The author approaches The Book of the Courtier as a text in which some of its most important aspects are intentionally concealed and veiled in allegory. W.R. Albury argues that this early modern reading of The Book of the Courtier enables us to recover a serious political message which has a great deal of contemporary relevance and which is lost from sight when the work is approached primarily as a courtly etiquette book, or as a lament for the lost influence of the aristocracy in an age when autocratic nation-states were coming into being, or as an impersonal textual field upon which a free play of transformations and deconstructions may be performed.

Author: Giovanni Della Casa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Carving (Meat, etc.)
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Author: Harry Berger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804739047
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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The Absence of Grace is a study of male fantasy, representation anxiety, and narratorial authority in two sixteenth-century books, Baldassare Castiglione's Il libro del Cortegiano (1528) and Giovanni Della Casa's Galateo (1558). The interpretive method is a form of close reading the author describes as reconstructed old New Criticism, that is, close reading conditioned by an interest in and analysis of the historical changes reflected in the text. The book focuses on the way the Courtier and Galateo cope with and represent the interaction between changes of elite culture and the changing construction of masculine identity in early modern Europe. More specifically, it connects questions of male fantasy and masculine identity to questions about the authority and reliability of narrators, and shows how these questions surface in narratorial attitudes toward socioeconomic rank or class, political power, and gender. The book is in three parts. Part One examines a distinction and correlation the Courtier establishes between two key terms, (1) sprezzatura, defined as a behavioral skill intended to simulate the attributes of (2) grazia, understood as the grace and privileges of noble birth. Because sprezzatura is negatively conceptualized as the absence of grace it generates anxiety and suspicion in performers and observers alike. In order to suggest how the binary opposition between these terms affected the discourse of manners, the author singles out the titular episode of Galateo, an anecdote about table manners, which he reads closely and then sets in its historical perspective. Part Two takes up the question of sprezzatura in the gender debate that develops in Book 3 of the Courtier, and Part Three explores in detail the characterization of the two narrators in the Courtier and Galateo, who are represented as unreliable and an object of parody or critique.

Author: Baldesar Castiglione
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101651008
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 73

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From the 100-part Penguin Great Ideas series comes an excerpt from the famous Book of the Courtier. In his witty and perceptive discourses on the ideal virtues of a Renaissance courtier, Baldesar Castiglione sets out values that continue to offer illumination in questions of leadership and government—espousing such qualities as prudence, courage, loyalty, affability, and style, and even encouraging the playing of sport as one of the best ways to gain influence and power. Penguin Great Ideas: Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves—and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war, and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked, and comforted. They have enriched lives—and destroyed them. Now Penguin Great Ideas brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals, and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. Other titles in the series include Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and Charles Darwin's On Natural Selection.

Author: Valeria Finucci
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804720458
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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"The Lady Vanishes focuses on the representation of women in two key works of the Italian Renaissance: Baldassarre Castiglione's treatise Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) and Ludovico Ariosto's chivalric romance Orlando Furioso. Using feminist, deconstructive, and psychoanalytical arguments, the author investigates power relations and the construction of women's subjectivities in sixteenth-century debates on women and popular narratives." "The book examines the construction of women in different modes: woman as exemplary model and as ridiculed object; woman as narcissistically self-centered and as masochistically altruistic; woman as subject of desire and as object of desire; woman as ambiguously gendered and as radical spectacle of femininity. Because they offer an array of characters ranging from masculine women to feminized men and experiment with many forms of transgressive desire, Castiglione and Ariosto provide the perfect arena for problematizing the Italian Renaissance discourses on gender and sexual difference, on the production of pleasure and theories of selfhood, and on the body and modes of spectatorship." "The author argues that women are indispensable to Castiglione's conversation on the courtier and the court lady not because, as is often contended, he was sympathetic toward women, but because he found women useful for their central role in the male construction of men's own image. As for Ariosto, he resolves his narrative by subsuming women to culture and society, thus sealing out disorder. Although at times portraying female rebellion and resentment as empowering, in the end he punishes women displaying these qualities by banishing them from the text. In contrast, he celebrates the acquiescent woman in the figure of the lady warrior Bradamante, who, upon resuming a properly feminine role, becomes the progenitrix of a dynasty." "The Italian Renaissance discourse on women cast them in both assertive and docile roles. In the end, however, they were restrained or expelled; their society could envision a freer order for men but not for women."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author: Paolo D'Angelo
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540345
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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The essence of art is to conceal art. A dancer or musician does not only need to perform with ability. There should also be a lack of visible effort that gives an impression of naturalness. To disguise technique and feign ease is to heighten beauty. To express this notion, Italian has a word with no exact equivalent in other languages, sprezzatura: a kind of unaffectedness or nonchalance. In this book, the first to consider sprezzatura in its own right, philosopher of art Paolo D’Angelo reconstructs the history of concealing art, from ancient rhetoric to our own times. The word sprezzatura was coined in 1528 by Baldassarre Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier to mean a kind of grace with a special essence: the ability to conceal art. But the idea reaches back to Aristotle and Cicero and forward to avant-garde works such as Duchamp’s ready-mades, all of which share the suspicion of the overt display of skill. The precept that art must be hidden turns up in a number of fields, from cosmetics to interior design, politics to poetry, the English garden to shabby chic. Through exploring different articulations of this idea, D’Angelo shows the paradox of aesthetics: art hides that it is art, but in doing so it reveals itself to be art and becomes an assertion about art. When art is concealed, it appears as spontaneous as nature—yet, paradoxically, also reveals its indebtedness to technique. An erudite and surprising tour through aesthetics, philosophy, and art history, Sprezzatura presents a strikingly original argument with deceptive ease.

Author: Elizabeth Bearden
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472131125
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Monstrous Kinds is the first book to explore textual representations of disability in the global Renaissance. Elizabeth B. Bearden contends that monstrosity, as a precursor to modern concepts of disability, has much to teach about our tendency to inscribe disability with meaning. Understanding how early modern writers approached disability not only provides more accurate genealogies of disability, but also helps nuance current aesthetic and theoretical disability formulations. The book analyzes the cultural valences of early modern disability across a broad national and chronological span, attending to the specific bodily, spatial, and aesthetic systems that contributed to early modern literary representations of disability. The cross section of texts (including conduct books and treatises, travel writing and wonder books) is comparative, putting canonical European authors such as Castiglione into dialogue with transatlantic and Anglo-Ottoman literary exchange. Bearden questions grand narratives that convey a progression of disability from supernatural marvel to medical specimen, suggesting that, instead, these categories coexist and intersect.