A Courtesy book or Book of Manners was a book dealing with issues of etiquette, behaviour and morals, with a particular focus on the life at princely courts. Courtesy literature can be traced back to 13th Century German and Italian writers.
In England the vogue for such literature derived primarily from Elizabethan translations of three sixteenth-century Italian texts on courtly manners and morals: Baldassarre Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528), Giovanni della Casa’s Il Galateo (1558) and Stefano Guazzo’s La Civil Conversazione (1574). Thomas Hoby published The Courtyer, his version of Il Cortegiano, in 1561 (although he had made the translation a decade earlier). The work was read widely and influenced the writings of Shakespeare, Spenser and Ben Jonson. Robert Peterson’s translation of Il Galateo appeared in 1576. George Pettie published The Civil Conversation, his translation of the first three books of Guazzo’s text, in 1581; the fourth and final book appeared five years later in a translation by Bartholomew Yonge. A well-known English example of the genre is Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman of 1622.
Famous quotes containing the words courtesy and/or book:
“When courtesy fails, be nasty, brutish, and short.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“No common-place is ever effectually got rid of, except by essentially emptying one’s self of it into a book; for once trapped in a book, then the book can be put into the fire, and all will be well. But they are not always put into the fire; and this accounts for the vast majority of miserable books over those of positive merit.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)