Practicing decorum and recognizing convention: The pedagogy of courtesy in Spenser and Castiglione

This dissertation explores the contradictory nature of the literary pedagogy of courtesy in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Castiglione's Book of the Courtier. I adapt Bourdieu's concept of the "double truth of practices" in order to argue that the complex attitude toward self-presentation revealed by these texts represents a commodification of disinterestedness, in which the performance of a lack of interest is itself the means for an artfully engineered self-advancement. I argue that Spenser and Castiglione, in enacting through their texts contemporary debates about the nature of aristocratic identity, find themselves simultaneously insisting on the pleasure of the text as an end in itself and gesturing toward the text's role as a medium of social advancement for both writer and reader.;In the case of Castiglione, I argue, courtly tastes work to facilitate a virtue that draws from classical conceptions of decorum yet is also adapted to the competitive milieu of the court, in which pleasure, self-interest, and virtue work together even as they remain in tension. In treating Spenser's Faerie Queene, I connect the instrumentality of courteous gifts to the gift of the text itself; I argue that both paradoxically increase the status of their givers despite their apparently self-deprecating performances. I also connect the humble gift to the genre of pastoral in order to show how Book VI of The Faerie Queene engages with Spenser's strategies of self-presentation in his other works. I further argue that the complicated relationship between The Faerie Queene's precepts and its narrative examples indicates that the "recognitions" on which the courtly elite bases itself involve much more than simple reading; instead, readers are caught up in the pleasure of recognizing literary conventions that have little relationship to contemporary society. While the role of pleasure is ultimately redeemed (if complicated) in Castiglione's text, for Spenser the pleasure of the text's literary examples threatens to undo its lessons.