cover image Fortunes of the Courtier - Ppr.*

Fortunes of the Courtier - Ppr.*

Peter Burke. Pennsylvania State University Press, $31.95 (210pp) ISBN 978-0-271-01517-0

The ""Courtier"" here is Baldassar Castiglione's 1528 publication Cortegiano or Book of the Courtier. In this overview of Castiglione's transmontane reception in its first century of publication, Burke, a Cambridge cultural historian, looks at the book's owners, admirers, translators, imitators, critics and philosophical and stylistic predecessors. Like Robert Darnton's bookish histories (most recently, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France), The Fortunes of the Courtier keeps a narrow focus but by so doing manages to reveal a great deal about changing social and intellectual attitudes. Take his example of Castiglione's Polish adherent Lukasz Gornicki, whose Polish Courtier is fairly close in many ways but omits women as characters and music, sculpture and painting-clearly what played in cosmopolitan Urbino was overly dainty for the tastes of the Polish march lords. Then there's the issue of translations, particularly of Castiglione's best-known concept, sprezzatura. Now we might translate it as ""insouciance"" but that borrowing wasn't available even to French translators until the 19th century, leaving 16th-century English translators to muddle through with clearly unsatisfactory substitutions like ""disgracing"" or ""recklessness."" Given the era's changing attitudes as Italophilia changed to Italophobia, Reformation to Counter-reformation, the only thing wrong with this book is that it could profitably have been longer. (Mar.)