Teorías de apoyo al proyecto

Two key factors highlight the difference between rhetoric in the height of Rome’s power and in the English Renaissance. First, humanist thinking led to the belief that more people from lower classes should be educated, and second, the printing press facilitated widespread literacy. As power moved away from orators who gave eloquent speeches and towards members of the social elite,

The Ciceronian public man, who exercised some political power openly in the state, was increasingly replaced by the figure of the courtier, who had to be deferential to the ruler in public and exercise political influence behind the scenes. The increasingly covert character of the public servant’s political power

is symbolized in part by the concept of sprezzatura, according to which the

talented and humanistically learned person should make his or her

accomplishments appear to be the outcome of unstudied nature, not art. (Bizzell and Herzberg, "Renaissance Rhetoric" 468)

This gave rise to conduct literature as a niche genre of educational literature. Louis B. Wright explains the rise of the handbook tradition of which courtesy literature is a part, observing,

With the rise of a vigorous, prosperous tradesman class, with the spread of the ambition for further advancement, both social and commercial, with the percolation even into the lower ranks of society of a Renaissance desire for

knowledge, and with the increase in literacy came a demand for some means of self-improvement. The answer was the handbook, the printed guide. (58) This printed guide emerges from a complex history of rhetorical and educational contexts; Tonkin calls their sources “a curious and sometimes unwieldy mixture of material traceable to the chivalric manuals of the fifteenth century, classical works on education and good

government, Christian doctrine, Italian humanism, and contemporary treatises on education or

political theory” (Spenser's Courteous Pastoral 164). Conduct literature’s rhetorical purpose

makes the genre particularly unique. It seeks to set forth a collection of rules that establish appropriate behavior in various situations.

Conduct literature at once gives the lower class the ability (or at least the perceived ability) to reach higher into the courtly society and perpetuates the difficulty in actually doing so. The genre “helped create and sustain the court’s view of its own virtue and centrality—the

dominant ideology of the Elizabethan ruling elite” (Whigham, Ambition and Privilege x).

Frank Whigham explains that “this demographic shift of new men into the ruling elite aroused a storm of controversy best seen as a crisis of legitimacy” ("Courtesy as a Social Code" 195). The humanist education movement led to “the proliferation of grammar schools for the poor, [which] opened new ways to power and prestige, outside the Church, for the burgeoning middle classes” (Ashley 112). When Thomas Wilson published the first English language rhetoric, his rhetorical handbook “represented a movement toward the democratization of the arts of discourse, making it available to a wider group of people” (Weaver 766). This blurred the lines between social classes, and the upward mobility of the lower class needed a form of guidance to “fit in” in a world governed by intricate social rules. Further, just as writers of English “vernacular manuals . . . worry that by making the tools of eloquence commonly

available . . . they may be . . . giving the ‘force’ of eloquence to the ‘wild savages’ rather than the wise orator” (Mann 207), the upper class worried that the lower class now possessed a tool that would enable their upward mobility. David Lee Miller notes that “the destabilizing of economic and class structures in sixteenth-century England led to a social environment marked . . . by the intense competition, insecurity, and conflict among the aristocracy” ("Calidore" 128). The genre, then, gave educated, middle-class individuals hope that they could move up in society while it perpetuated the divide between the classes and insecurity among individuals of the ruling class.

The conventions of Renaissance conduct literature emerge from both historical

precedent and social pragmatism. The genre often features tension between public expression and private correspondence; the writer of early conduct literature generally presented the work as a letter to a close friend or family member, ostensibly distancing the author of the work

from responsibility for the contents.14 The letter often included a preface that explained the

author’s purpose and apologized for the poor quality of the work—a rhetorical move known as

the humility topos.15 The Roman precedents for this convention include most of Cicero’s work,

addressed frequently to his brother or Atticus; Quintilian’s Instituto Oratoria, dedicated to

Marcellus Victorius; the anonymous Rhetorica Ad Herennium, dedicated to Gaius Herennius;

and even Horace’s Ars Poetica, written entirely in the form of a letter to the Piso family.

Following this tradition established by their Roman influences lent the Renaissance authors

legitimacy and gravitas and also allowed them some deniability when it came to wider

14

Aron Morgan offers a succinct history of how letter writing (ars dictaminis) evolved as a new form of rhetoric in the Medieval period. See Witt and Camargo for the early tradition. See Beebee for epistolary tradition from 1500- 1850.

15 _{Whigham refers to the humility topos as “the gesture of self-deprecation, which extracts ratifying compliment and} reassurance from an audience by a false humility which they feel bound to contradict” ("Courtesy as a Social Code" 196).

publication. Castiglione displays this convention in his prefatory letter to the Bishop of Viseu

when he claims that he “could not but feel a certain annoyance” that his Courtier—arguably

the most influential example of conduct literature—had begun circulating publically, “a large part of it [having been] transcribed” without his consent (1). By presenting his work as a personal document that he was “forced” to publish, Castiglione mitigates his responsibility for

the content and quality of the work and relies on the humility topos.16 Though using such a

dedication before a rhetorical or literary work would seem to limit the audience of the texts,

these conduct manuals enjoyed a wide circulation. The Courtier was first circulated in

manuscript form then later printed under Castiglione’s direction. Renaissance courtesy

literature clearly targeted a wider audience than the individuals to whom the books claim to be addressed.

While conduct literature has a clear rhetorical purpose, its place in the rhetorical tradition is less clear. It does not fit neatly into the three classical subdivisions of rhetoric,

being neither deliberative, judicial, nor epideictic. L.A. Coutant describes the rhetoric in The

Courtier as epistemic: “Castiglione’s nobles engage in an epistemic rhetoric wherein the merits of noble or common birth are debated as seriously as skill in the military and fine arts” (97). Epistemic rhetoric—the concept that “rhetoric itself is a way of knowing”—claims that experience and action form understanding, or that the active study of knowledge creates

knowledge (Scott 232). Coutant’s claim makes sense in that the characters of The Courtier

strive to create knowledge—the conception of an ideal courtier—through conversation.

However, one could argue that other texts such as Plato’s Symposium and Cicero’s On the

16 _{For a thorough discussion of this common posture as well as an index of works that take a similar position, see}

Ideal Orator do the same, and all three of these texts may simply qualify as examples of dialectic rhetoric.

Both epistemic rhetoric and dialectic are limited to a way of knowing or understanding something, but conduct literature first defines the knowledge then moves the reader to action. This active, prescriptive nature differentiates conduct literature from traditional oratory. While it incorporates elements of classical rhetoric—analyzing outcomes of different decisions stems from deliberative rhetoric and using discussion to conceptualize an ideal combines features of dialectic, epideictic, and epistemic rhetoric—as a whole, conduct literature departs from classical rhetoric. Unlike other related Renaissance genres such as educational handbooks, poetic treatises, and many poetic and dramatic forms, conduct literature lacks a direct Greek or

Roman ancestor, with the possible exception of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, an ethical

treatise which has a rhetorical purpose that reflects that of conduct literature. Written by Aristotle for his son, the work begins with the statement, “every art and every investigation,

and similarly every action and pursuit, is considered to aim at some good” (The Nicomachean

Ethics 1.1). Hence, Aristotle develops an ethically-based conception of how one may live a good life. While this text has a more philosophical and hypothetical approach than the practical “how-to” quality of Renaissance conduct literature, its purpose aligns with the premise of conduct literature—how to thrive in a civil society.

Cicero and Quintilian include some ideas that seem to have influenced the genre of

conduct literature in On the Ideal Orator and Institutes of Oratory. While the texts differ

widely from each other—Cicero’s represents a philosophy of oratory and Quintilian’s an educational philosophy—they each touch on ideas of proper conduct. Quintilian writes about custom in both language and life, calling “custom in speaking . . . the agreement of the

educated, just as I call custom in living the agreement of the good” (1.6.45). Quintilian’s focus,

however, remains narrowly on the function of language and education. While Cicero’s On the

Ideal Orator is not itself conduct literature, it was hugely influential to the development of the quintessential text of the Renaissance conduct literature genre, for Castiglione claimed that it

was the model for The Courtier. The differences between the model text and Castiglione’s

reveal the change in the social structure of the world in which each text was written; Daniel

Javitch prefaces his translation of The Courtier with,

The comparison between the two works [invited by Castiglione’s claim] also served to reveal the degree to which the norms of public behavior advocated in The Courtier—and they were quite different from those prescribed the ideal Roman orator—were conditioned by the changed political and social

circumstances of a modern court. (viii)

As did many Renaissance writers, Castiglione recovered the form and ideas from Cicero, then updated them to fit his purposes given his social context.

While the terms “conduct literature” and “conduct manual” are useful for documenting the historical development of the genre, the term “courtesy literature” becomes more

appropriate17 as this discussion moves forward into the Renaissance. During the Renaissance,

conduct literature underwent a transition to courtesy literature. The issue was no longer a question of how to conduct oneself in the world, but how to achieve a higher level of social discourse through both speech and action that became important. On one end, the courtesy literature sought to promote the “civil conversation” that would enable one to live

17 _{Dorothy Woodward Culp disagrees, saying “There is no clearly developed Renaissance theory about a virtue}

called ‘courtesy.’ There are, to be sure, a large number of books which examine the nature of true nobility and the virtues that the gentleman or prince should possess. These works, most unfortunately, have been termed ‘courtesy books’ by many modern scholars though, in fact, courtesy is discussed very little in them” (38). While this may be true for many of the manuals, some of them, such as Guazzo’s Civile Conversation, discuss the moral virtue as well.

harmoniously in the world, and on the other end, it provided the “rules of the road” for social success and promotion at court. Courtesy literature provided a map to guide individuals through (and, ostensibly, up) increasingly complex social relationships. Rhetoric and effective language use lie at the heart of courtesy literature, the “the first true attempts to rationalize man’s ways to man” which “are bound up inextricably with an extensive conception of man as communicator” (Mohrmann 194). Whereas earlier rhetorical handbooks simply catalogued the tropes, figures, and traits of an effective orator, courtesy literature dealt with the entire

spectrum of verbal, emotional, and physical human interactions in a variety of complex and ever-changing contexts and sought to establish an ideal of human behavior.