2 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2021
    1. Above you can browse Leonard Eckstein Opdycke’s 1902 translation of Il Cortegiano. While the book was first translated into English by Thomas Hoby in 1561, and again in 1727, Opdycke’s effort arose from the scarcity of copies available at the century’s turn.

      What other translations of Il Cortegiano exist?

      Is there a truly handsome volume of it currently in print?

  2. Jan 2019
    1. sprezzatur

      Sprezzatura is a kind of practiced nonchalance, the play-it-cool mentality that conceals the strategic inner rhetorician. Think Varys in Game of Thrones. A cooler example occurs in Skyfall , in which James Bond descends through the roof of a moving train car while said roof is basically torn off and then immediately fixes his cufflinks like nothing happened. Perhaps not sensible from a narrative point of view, but certainly rhetorically appropriate for the audience and very sprezzatura. Another Renaissance example that we read in Dr. Lynch's Rhetoric I class is Christine de Pizan's The Treasure of the City of Ladies, which is like Castiglione's book if the audience were women of the court.