Galateo

"That’s not entirely true. The next book on my list, Galateo – first published in Venice in 1558 – is a kind of how-to manual. It advises you on how to conduct yourself. And this was an absolute best seller, which reached far beyond the nobility, certainly into the literate urban middle classes. I guess it’s a book that gives ideas to people who are aspiring, but who haven’t necessarily made it. I think it gives a very nice sense of the preoccupations of everyday life in the Renaissance. It’s telling you how to behave in the most concrete sort of way. This is the guide which really will tell you what to do and what not to do – and it’s very overt and frank in its instructions. For example: Don’t touch your private parts in public. If you’re walking down the road and you see a pool of vomit or a piece of dog shit, don’t point it out to your companions. If you blow your nose, don’t then look in the handkerchief as though you’re examining a handful of jewels. Galateo links in with my interest in the material and the grounded – the experience of the Renaissance. Della Casa enjoyed the typical career path of an elite Renaissance man. He was born into a wealthy landowning Tuscan family, he studied law in Florence and Padua, decided to enter the church, wrote saucy poetry and Latin treatises and cosied up to cardinals. He’s really only famous for this one book. He follows in a tradition – perhaps better known is Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier , published about 30 years earlier. That’s another book that tries to tell you how to behave (although I think that Castiglione is a lot less frank, a lot less direct – partly because his work is written as a dialogue, a conversation between people discussing how best to behave). Giovanni della Casa really tells you how it is. And as you say, it’s interesting that this is coming from a cleric – it again slightly confounds our sense of what the Renaissance is about. Because although, traditionally, the Renaissance is often thought of as a secular age, the church was fundamental to much of the cultural creativity of this era."