I have been listening to The Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione’s great Renaissance dialogue about the qualities that make an ideal gentleman, or, more broadly, an ideal civilized person.
It is a fascinating book, full of conversation about manners, dress, music, physical grace, learning, love, wit, and conduct. But what has struck me thus far is the sustained attention given to speech: what constitutes beautiful diction, what dialect is most graceful, which authorities one ought heed, and how a cultivated person should sound.
There are intense debates over whether a courtier should model his Italian on the polished Tuscan of Petrarch and Boccaccio or limit himself to the living speech of his own region; whether he ought to use esoteric Greek and Latin terms; and whether foreign or fashionable expressions are permissible. One speaker approves such terms as primor for excellence, acertare for success, attillato for a supremely well-appointed person, and the courtly phrase un cavalier senza rimproccio, “a knight without reproach,” so long as one could reasonably expect to be understood by the listener. The characters split hairs over pronunciation, elocution, and the danger of sounding too provincial, too archaic, or too eager to display one’s learning.
And, of course, all of it now sounds remote.
Not foolish. But remote.
The book was written in the early sixteenth century and published in 1528. Its English life began with Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of 1561. Nearly five centuries later, the standards of refinement so earnestly discussed in its pages have become historical curiosities. The “best” way to speak and write has not survived unchanged. The melodious Tuscan sentence, the allusions, and the proper learned reference belong to a world that has disappeared.
This has made me think about our preoccupation with style as writers.
We are advised to find our voice. We are urged to cut unnecessary words, avoid adverbs, vary sentence length, write plainly, write vividly, write commercially, write lyrically, write with restraint, write with urgency. One school tells us to make our prose invisible. Another insists that we must cut every sentence that does not sparkle. We are warned against sentimentality, told to beware of cliché, encouraged to sound of-the-moment, and cautioned never (ever) to sound as though we are trying too hard.
Listening to Castiglione, however, I found myself wondering whether today’s absolute certainties about “good writing” will someday sound equally quaint.
What will readers a few hundred years from now make of our clipped dialogue, our cinematic scenes, our confessional first person, our therapeutic vocabulary, our irony, our preference for accessibility? What will they think of the contemporary habit of calling every difficulty a “journey,” every private pain “trauma,” and every minor revelation “powerful”?
Future readers will regard our most admired stylistic conventions the way we regard the courtly refinements of the Renaissance: revealing, elaborate, sometimes charming, but unmistakably of their era.
That is inevitable.
Language changes. Words change their meanings. Syntax changes. Social expectations change. What once sounded noble will sound pompous later, and what sounded refreshingly plain will seem bare or careless. Every age has its fashionable forms of seriousness, cleverness, delicacy, rebellion, and restraint.
This does not mean that style is meaningless. It means that, like us, style is mortal.
Nevertheless, The Book of the Courtier has survived. I am listening to it 498 years after it was published because its underlying questions are still alive. How should an accomplished man present himself to the world? How does one show knowledge without pedantry? How does one possess sophistication without vanity? How does one travel and entertain well?
Castiglione’s answer was sprezzatura: the art of making difficult things look easy. The courtier must be skilled, smart, physically capable, musically sensitive, and socially alert, yet must not seem to labor at any of it.
Today we want everyone to know how hard we work and how busy we are, but we still admire cool. We still dislike show-offs. We still want the artist, the host, the speaker, the writer, and the well-dressed person to appear natural. Even now, though we want acknowledgement for our suffering, we praise results that arrive fully formed (or seem to), like magic.
Writers know better.
We know that a smooth sentence is the residue of revision. A graceful paragraph has been rearranged countless times. A sentence that sounds inevitable cost an afternoon. The casual voice is carefully constructed; realistic dialogue has been pared down from pages of explanation.
Style has always been social. It is never merely technical. Style—in writing or anything else—tells people what we value. It announces our loyalties, education, ambitions, fears, worldliness and intelligence. The rules change, but the longing beneath them remains the same: we want to speak in a way that persuades others we are worth listening to.
Still, there is comfort in recognizing that no style is permanent.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time worrying over the machinery surrounding a book. Does she have an agent? Is he traditionally published or self-published? Who designed the cover? Did we hire a human editor, or use artificial intelligence? What methods are acceptable for research? How many em-dashes are in a work and what significant things does that tell us about the writer? Did we choose the proper platform? If we market the work are we selling out? If we don’t market the work are we clueless?
In the long view, none of that will matter—not one bit. The cover will disappear, the platform will change many, many times, credentials will lose their meaning, and even the exhaustive arguments over how a book was created will be old-fashioned. What will matter is whether the work contains an idea worth a reader’s time.
Our writing will become dated. The phrases that make sense today, the forms we admire, and our notions of clarity and beauty will eventually bear the stamp of our age.
The writer’s job is now, and has always been, to say something worth saying.
When our sentences sound antique, and they will, what remains is an idea, a feeling, an observation sufficiently alive to be worth hearing after the rules that shaped it have been forgotten.