The Fortunes of the Courier: the European Reception of the Castiglione's Cortegino.

Peter Burke has written another interesting and enlightening book to add to his impressively long list - more than ten - of earlier published works. The main subject here is Castiglione's Cortegiano, not especially the meaning or sense of the work but rather the "history of the book." He focuses thus on who read the book, when and where it was read, and what its main influences were. Geographically he emphasizes Europe as a whole and chronologically mainly the first century after the Courtier's publication in 1528, although he also carries the story briefly through the following centuries and into the present. Burke's book then is essentially a synthesis of the works of others, both present and past; but it is a remarkably wide-ranging one, which often makes one reflect and think and which never loses its thread. It is also clearly written and draws on a remarkably wide-range of knowledge, literary as well as historical.

To take on such a large subject in such a short space (157 pages of text) is inevitably to make statements that would not sit well with specialists of the period, area or writer concerned. I found a good number of these for my areas of specialization, and I am quite certain that those concerned with other areas would as well. But Burke, like the Castiglione he describes, is aware of opposing views and possible criticisms; and he often anticipates them and presents them as plausible alternatives. He thus is never polemical, and always very informative.

In his first chapter Burke lays the foundations for the three main larger themes of his study, the "reception of the Renaissance outside Italy, the history of the book, and the history of value-systems," (p. 2) which he will tie to the specific case study of the history of the Courtier. And he traces, from the ancient Greeks to the period of Castiglione, the emergence of what he finds as three ideals, those of chivalry, courtesy and urbanity, all of which can be found in the Courtier. The second chapter describes Castiglione and his work, presenting the genre, analyzing the text, and relating it to its historical context. The third presents the history of the book in Italy in roughly the first century after its publication, showing that it was read quite differently from how it usually is today (people were particularly interested in the jokes, for instance). One of his categories for who read the book is women, and he has some interesting things to say on this subject (for instance, he finds the Courtier to have been read quite widely by women in the middle years of the sixteenth century). And in the end he finds the book to represent certain Mannerist aspects. The fourth chapter describes the translations of the Cortegiano and their diffusion and reception in Europe in these same years. The fifth chapter focuses on the book's influences on other writers, and the sixth on the criticisms of the book and the various censorships of it in the same chronological period. The seventh chapter describes the various "revivals" of interest in the Courtier from the 1630s to the present. Burke emphasizes that there was a real decline of interest and then revivals, rather than a steady and continual interest. And the last chapter offers general reflections on the reception of the Courtier and what this reception tells about the nature of European culture as a whole and its regional similarities and differences (Burke notes the timeliness of trying to work out a "European" approach to cultural history). In all of these chapters Burke makes use of methodologies presently employed in studying the "history of the book" and its relationship to those who read it, or to those who owned it and did not read it; for instance, he explores the use of marginalia and he studies networks among readers.

I personally found the most useful chapters to be 3 to 6, which all keep a chronological focus on the century after the first publication of the Courtier. But there is definitely material for reflection in the other chapters as well.

Ellery Schalk University of Texas, El Paso