Galateo: A Renaissance Treatise on Manners

Courtesy books have a special relationship to the age that produces them. By attempting to codify manners, styles, ideals and values of a society, they reveal the principles and presuppositions that shape and animate their world. Galateo does this brilliantly. It reflects the personal experience, wisdom, disappointments, and ambitions of its clerical but worldly-wise author as well as the fundamental values of his age. And, given that his age was that of the transformation from the High Renaissance in Italy to the world of the Counter-Reformation, and that Della Casa was an important actor in the events of his time, the lessons are particularly valuable and worth considering.