HC 102H, Honors College World Literature

Some notes on The Courtier:

Book 2

• See pp. 107-12 for a discourse on the modern. Think about whether you have read these sentiments in any other text we've read last term or this. This desire for the modern characterizes the shift from the medieval to the modern.
• See p. 109 for a description of court intrigue. What makes intrigue so intriguing? How do other "courts" fit into this scene of intrigue?
• See pp. 134-6 for a description of clothes--utterly fascinating, note the "modern" echoes
• See pp. 148-52 for a disquistion on art and deception. Remember that the Renaissance sensibility sees the center of "artificial" as "art," and "art" is not a bad thing. Evaluate the idiom of deception and how it affects a definition of self
• See pp. 157-8 for an analysis of jokes in this court.

   

  In Book 3, you might look at the "one-sex model" of the human being on page 220. Renaissance Biology 101 posited that all homunculi (the complete human being that inhabits, "microscopically", the male ejaculate) are utterly identical sexually; what determines the homunculus's growth into a male or female is the amount of heat and moisture in the womb (hot and dry are the masculine attributes in the Four Qualities theory of the universe, cold and wet the female). Sex, then, is not an absolute but drawn on a continuum, from the very, very feminine to the very, very masculine with all kinds of gradations in-between.

  Note too the way Castiglione approaches the "double standard," p. 242.

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This page created by Louise M. Bishop | Last updated 2 February 2000