The Immersion Library

But one swallow does not make a summer.

Nor does one crow make a winter.

Baldesar Castiglione goes to great effort in describing the perfect courtier. Why? I imagine he wants to inscribe the timeless virtues of Renaissance manners and values on the everlasting mountain of human history. Though in his and his characters’ endless humility, he non-chalantly acquiesces to time and public opinion to determine his success. Perhaps he wanted to instruct the masses, regardless of social station, on how to live a noble life. He does, after all, defend the value of describing the unattainable. Or, and perhaps more likely, he writes this for himself; to dictate his arguments, feelings and lessons in an imaginitively organized dialogue that will reflect back to him ideas that may have jumbled in his own mind.

This book is not what it seems. While discounting Boccaccio, he models the environs of his diatribe after <i>The Decameron</i> insofar as various people participate in a game to design the perfect courtier and take turns making arguments much like the traded stories in Boccaccio’s masterpiece. He leads the reader to believe that the arguments aim to reveal the ultimate compilation of virtues within a single person and perhaps even a blueprint for success in Renaissance society. And yet, I felt that he instead argued for the virtues themselves rather than they’re possible embodiment in a person; the means rather than the end.

In the first book, he begins by identifying the characteristics of the perfect courtier to satisfy the rules of the game. The second book delves deeper into conversation about the appropriate usage of such virtuous characteristics. In these first books, I found myself less enthralled by the teachings and more enammored by the act of Castiglione playing chess with himself. He cleverly anticipates and writes thwarting arguments to counter his theses which helped me relate the content to this 21st century.

In the third book, he begins arguing for the perfect woman courtier. The arguments heat up intensely here with certain men offended at the idea of a woman courtier embodying noble virtues which Nature deems fitting only for men. Those who argue for the natural inferiority of women employ presumptive statements which in themselves cannot withstand any validation, ie, frailty despite giving birth, the female gender as a genetic imperfection despite Nature’s need for procreation, etc. The modern reader seethes not only at the arguments but at the fact that some still resonate in the modern day. I believe Castiglione falls into a trap here, though I do commend him for working within the constraints of his time. He falters by arguing on their battlefield. He refutes their assertions with numerous examples of noble women which then instigates others to present their own examples of their frailty, imperfection and even evil. One man argues that one swallow does not make a summer but won’t acknowledge that one crow does not make a winter either. Castiglione also depends on men to defend women while the most powerful person in their company, in addition to the one officiating the game, is a woman! Can they not speak and argue on their own behalf? Instead, they have to listen to their very dignity dissected as an academic exercise.

The final book illuminates the heights of what I believe to be Castiglione’s main purose in writing this book which is to glorify not the perfect courtier but the perfect transendence from being human. The arguments grow in scale from describing the courtier, a simple person and position within the confines of man-made civilization, to the appropriate application of these virtues, how to live rather than simply be, to the third book, which by stripping a fundamental component of personal identity in gender one understands these virtues as entities unto themselves, and finally the transcendence of caged concsciousness of natural sense through love and understanding beauty. His arguments become even more philosophical in attempting to describe what exists outside of human intellect and language.

Once reaching this height, he has no where else to go.