John S. Ott (c2012, c2014)
Portland State University
HST 356U - Renaissance and Reformation Europe


STUDY QUESTIONS AND READING GUIDE
for ITALIAN COURT LIFE AND MORES and PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA


Readings

With these selections, we enter the courtly milieu of Italy during the period from 1500-1600, although Italian elites had begun establishing courts in urban centers (and rural areas) centuries before this.  As these selections suggest, the great courts of the Italian nobility could be highly competitive places.  Our first reading is set in the hill-town of Urbino, and is from Baldessare Castiglione's (1478-1529) Book of the Courtier (Il Cortegiano), which he penned while in the service of the Duke of Urbino between 1504-1516.  (There is a famous portrait of the author by Raphael, now at the Louvre Museum in Paris.)  The duchy and court of Urbino, under the power of the Ducal house of Montefeltro and its lords Federigo (1444-1482) and Guidobaldo (1482-1508), was one of the most influential of its day.  Castiglione was a consummate courtier and man of means, and an astute observer of the environment in which he lived and served.  The Courtier is divided into four books and set over a period of four consecutive evenings in the palace of Urbino, where a group of court attendees, both men and women, engage in various word games, dialogues, and other social pursuits.  The passage opens with the group deciding on a subject to debate; ultimately they decide it should be on the necessary qualities of the perfect courtier.  The text, however, ranges far beyond this subject matter, exploring the virtues of women, the best kind of government, the role of reason, and so on.  The exchange concludes at dawn of the fourth day, with the sun rising behind Mt. Catria

Our next reading is by a prominent and outspoken woman writer of our period, Lucrezia Marinella.  Marinella (1571-1653) -- born much later than her forerunners Christine de Pizan, Laura Cereta, Isotta Nogarola, Costanza Varano, and Cassandra Fedele, all of whom wrote in the 1400s -- enjoyed an enviable social position.  She was the daughter of a well-known physician, philosopher, and author, she was not pressured into early marriage -- Laura Cereta, for example, was married at age fifteen, and was a widow within eighteen months -- and her studies were encouraged from an early age.  She wrote her polemical treatise on The Nobility and Excellence of Women in 1600, in response to a male-authored polemic entitled The Defects of Women that had come out a year before.  In doing so, she was entering into a long-running, virtually pan-European literary debate about the qualities and nature of women, one which had taken off 400 years earlier and was participated in by Christine de Pizan, among others.  Marinella was a prolific author, and also composed lyrics, prose, and poety of a religious bent.  She lived and died in Venice.

Isotta Nogarola (1418-1466) and Costanza Varano (1426-1447) were near contemporaries. Varano was educated in the household of her grandmother, Battista Malatesta, after her father was murdered by his brothers and her mother fled the family home. Battista was herself highly educated and correspondent with the learned Florentine chancellor and humanist, Leonardo Bruni. Costanza learned Greek and Latin, and read classical and Christian writers. She wrote her first public oration at the age of 16, the same time at which she wrote her letter to Isotta. After marrying into the prominent Sforza ducal family of Milan, she moved back to her paternal home, only to die, at the age of 21, during or shortly after the birth of her second child. Isotta Nogarola's fame was greater than that of Varano. She was home-educated by a famous humanist of Verona, Martino Rizzoni, and composed numerous letters and treatises. Isotta would recite one of her poetic works before Pope Nicholas V in Rome, and found work in Venice. She never married.

Looking ahead, Giovanni Pico was the son of the prince of Mirandola (1463-1494), a region near to Ferrara in Italy, and thus a man of high social standing.  He lived only 31 years, yet in that brief time established himself as one of the foremost philosophers of the Italian Renaissance.  He studied church law at Bologna, as well as Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin at the universities of Ferrara and Padua.  Pico and was exposed to the Platonic and Neoplatonic doctrines espoused in the Academy, a school of philosophers and humanists in Florence modelled after the famous Greek Academy of Plato.  In 1486, at the tender age of 23, he published a list of 900 Conclusions, a series of philosophical theses drawn from various philosophers, and invited a public disputation on them--a sort of colloquium on the philosophy of man.  Thirteen of the theses were condemned by the papacy the following year, however.  Pico retracted them but did not renounce them, and soon fled to France before the threat of inquisitorial proceedings.  His colloquium never took place.  In any case, what we know as Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man--a title he did not give it, and an oration he never actually delivered--was probably intended as the introduction to his formal defense of the theses before the pope.  It was not published until after his death, in 1496.  The treatise is typically considered one of the fullest and richest expressions of the Renaissance humanistic spirit of the period, yet this has much to do with its publication history and modern (nineteenth-century) interest in the Oration.

Questions

(1) What particular personal qualities and values do Castiglione’s debaters esteem in the courtier?  Who is the “courtier” and to what class does he belong?  What are the counter-arguments raised by the disputants?
(2) What is the difference between affectation/ostentation and appropriate physical adornment, according to both Castiglione and Marinella?  Do they agree, and if so on what points?
(3) How do Castiglione and Marinella go about formulating their arguments; that is, what rhetorical techniques do they use to make their points or to describe the issues at hand?
(4) What Petrarchan or humanist ideas do the letters of Isotta and Costanza reflect? What rhetorical techniques do they employ in communicating with their recipients?

(5) What does Pico’s treatise reveal of his philosophical world view?  How does Pico describe the process of learning and the nature of human intelligence?  Would you consider his view that of a “Christian,” and if so, in what way?  Why would the pope have felt threatened by Pico's publications?
(6) What, for Pico, is man's highest calling?