http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/courtier/courtier.html
A Stumble from Razvigor induces nostalgia. Here’s an online edition of Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, as translated by Thomas Hoby. I was lucky enough to have spent the better part of my second year at Uni on a research project, preparing an annotated version of Hoby’s diary. Hoby was one of the Protestants who slipped out of England during Queen Mary’s persecutions, and in his few years spent on the Continent he was always in the right place at the right time, attending many historical events (e.g. the Diet of Wurms – not to be confused with… well, you know…) and meeting many personages that shaped the history of Europe in the 16th century. His translation became quite popular amongst the ‘courtly love’ crowd, and had an impact on Elizabethan court culture. I’ve been eagerly awaiting my prof’s book (for which my research and translations will furnish some footnotes) now for eleven years, but much like the watched pot, I suppose a hounded academic never publishes.
