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Essay on "The book of courtiers" (in 1529)
This is the study of the famous courtesy book, Book of the Courtier (1528), is a densely argued and meticulously structured reading of these courtesy books, which, as Berger demonstrates, and others before him had already shown, reveal so much more early modern psychological complexities than just rules of behavior. This book not only fulfills the long-standing need for a comprehensive study in English of della Casa's short but powerful treatise, but it will also undoubtedly have an impact on criticism of Castiglione and of the Italian court culture similar to that of classics such as Wayne Rebhorn's Courtly Performances (to which the author repeatedly declares his indebtedness), J. R. Woodhouse's Baldesar Castiglione: A Reassessment of "The Courtier," and Robert Hanning and David Rosand's edition of the influential set of essays entitled Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture. (Baldesar Castiglione, January 1999)
Like these studies, The Absence of Grace depicts a Renaissance court society constantly grappling with the discrepancy between its own ascriptive ideals of behavior and a fallen world riddled with court politics and inward violence. Berger's analysis in particular takes as its point of departure the tension between an old aristocratic ideal of inherited and virtuous `grace' (grazia, defined by Berger as a perfectly natural and inborn je ne sais quoi of courtly behavior, and a carefully crafted, performative and dissimulative mimicry of this ideal by the courtiers, prompted by a crisis of the aristocracy entailing "the failure of ascriptive norms of blood and lineage to sustain moral authority and political efficacy". (Peter Burke, January 2001)
It is from this that Berger defines the famous notion of sprezzatura. Often considered the Renaissance's glorious emulation of the classical ars est celare artem, the art to perform actions and gestures without appearing to be artful....
