INTRODUCTION

“Thou wert the kindest man that ever struck with sword.”^[1]
“Manners makyth the man.”^[2]

On the wall of a dark cell in the Martelet dungeon of Loches where the once powerful duke of Milan, Ludovico il Moro, was a prisoner until his death, the visitor can still see a sensitive graffito, presumably a self-portrait in the garb of a condottiero.^[3] We may wonder why this victim of his own ruses would have chosen to see himself as a knight in shining armor at the head of a professional army. In his ambitious career of diplomatic guile there had been no direct exercise of knightly or military arts beyond the memory of his father Francesco Sforza-the only condottiero to rise from humble origins to a dukedom. The self-image that Ludovico was contemplating was only wishful thinking-in line with the well-known equestrian statue Leonardo had projected for him. In the privacy of his cell, in the authenticity of a dialogue with himself alone, he was probably indulging in an “ideological” act, a homage to a governing ideology of which he had been protagonist, witness, and victim all in one. Much better known is Titian's equestrian portrait (1548) of the Emperor Charles V at the battle of Mühlberg (1547). Although throughout his eventful career Charles V was indeed inspired by knightly ideals (even to the extent of challenging Francis I of France to personal combat in 1536), he was hardly in a position to go to battle with the lance he symbolically carries in the portrait. Yet he, too, wanted to see himself as a fighting knight.

In the course of my survey we shall observe other characters typically looking at themselves, at their self-fashioned mental portraits, and eagerly, willfully seeking identities. Literary knights and courtiers from

Chrétien's Yvain to Castiglione's Courtier will ask themselves: “Who am I?”^[4] The answer could only come from the surfacing to the level of individual consciousness of a socially bound criterion, since it derived from belonging to a group. Medieval and Renaissance man and woman could acquire an identity either by statute (as by the feudal, chivalric notion of nobility through blood and inheritance) or by education (as in the sociocultural making of the Renaissance courtier), but actions were always to be judged on the basis of membership in a specific social group. Michel Foucault has postulated that the modern alliance between criminal law and psychiatry has shifted from a criterion of sanctioning only deeds, as in Cesare Beccaria, to a need to associate action to individual character. The modern justice system is baffled by a criminal who admits everything but offers no reason, motive, or cause. In a way, the situations we shall observe are the obverse of this predicament: virtues and crimes were, officially, neither objective facts nor consequences of psychological motives, but projections of the doer's social position. It was not a crime for a knight to kill a commoner, nor to kill another knight in a fair encounter. It was a crime for a commoner to hurt a knight for whatever reason, or for a king to injure a knight by denying him his statutory rights.^[5]

Admittedly, we have come a long way from the New Critics' view of literary “well-wrought urns” as self-contained artifacts speaking for themselves through their structure and texture, synchronically and without necessary ties to a historic ambiance. Even Austin Warren and René Wellek's focus (in 1948) on “intrinsic” versus “extrinsic” approaches as the most appropriate way of understanding literary products may now sound rather remote.^[6] On the premise that works of art are only very special results of social and cultural conditions, the search for “literariness” no longer seems to preclude “total historicization.” All existential experience is seen as the stuff of which literary works are textured. More important than the literary work's discrete “content” is the semiotic realization that, like any other message, it also obeys the principle that “a message signifies only insofar as it is interpreted from the point of view of a given situation, a psychological as well as a historical, social and anthropological one.”^[7] The well-wrought urn is no longer isolated either from the “producer” or from the “consumer.” Conversely, we have been witnessing the intensive application of “literary” criteria to cultural works of all types, including the Bible.^[8]

Inadequate as New Criticism may appear to us in this respect, it is nevertheless far from dead: some critics have analyzed American decon-

structionism as an extreme phase of it.^[9] In the sense of a radical subjectivization of texts and readers as essentially deprived of hard objective rapport with an outside reality, the deconstructionist's point is that the text's referential quality is inherently ambiguous and inward-looking. The following study assumes, instead, that the text has a meaningful mode of existence by outward referentiality both at the point of origin (in the author's intention to express and represent) and at the point of communication (in the reader's response by recognition of interpreted reality).

Literary historians have long agreed that social questions are central to the Arthurian texts, since these texts ostensibly frame individual destinies within social bonds and duties.^[10] Dealing with Occitan literature, even the results of formal criticism (by, say, Robert Guiette, Roger Dragonetti, and Paul Zumthor) have turned out to accord with the analysis of social and moral thematic content as practiced by a Pierre Bec or an Erich Köhler.^[11] To relate literature to society is productive for both literary history and social history because, just as social structures condition literature, so literature can condition social behavior. This is particularly true of chivalry and courtliness. In response to the deacon of Toledo's claim that knights errant were but figments of the imagination, Don Quixote reeled off a list of fully documentable historic characters fitting the description (Don Quixote part 1, chap. 47). Early romances had conspired with historical institutions to create patterns of conduct that affected many a daily life well into the seventeenth century and beyond.^[12]

The daily life and rituals of dominant social groups constitute the backdrop of my inquiry into literature's significant role.^[13] The method of critical literary history I shall exemplify and test sees this discipline as “a body of signifieds to which literary signifiers must be attached, or re-attached by the scholar after time has eroded the connections,”^[14] for, contrary to the “isolating” view (like that of New Critics and later seekers of a pure “literariness” inherently transcending history), literature “also creates the culture by which it is created, shapes the fantasies by which it is shaped, begets that by which it is begotten,”^[15] in a constant symbiosis that requires both terms, the cultural and the poetic, the ideological or even the material and the imaginary, for true understanding. Literature is not merely an epiphenomenon arising out of social reality: it is part of the cultural forces that both reflect and motivate real behavior. This type of hermeneutics is shared by the New Historicists, who for some years have been reexamining our image of the past in terms of

correspondences between material situations (“motives”) and seemingly free constructs of the artistic imagination. Cultural forms are seen to mirror social structures, although they do so through interpretation and imaginative reaction.^[16] My threefold theme is an exemplary ground for sociological analysis because it ideally shows the bidirectional movement from reality to imagination and vice versa, each pole being necessary and functional for a fuller understanding of the other. The sociological perspective will therefore see society both as the point of genesis of the work of art and as its point of destination. Literary history thus becomes at the same time history of authors and history of readers, history of the input and impact of social groups and situations on the production of literary works, and history of their collective reception in society. As Köhler states, this approach to literature should be called sociological literary history or sociohistorical literary criticism.^[17] Sociology of literature as such is, instead, mostly concerned with the impact of literature on society—which will be only subsidiary and occasional here, and is not centrally an aesthetic question. Rather than the history of social realities, my aim shall be the history of the cultural models that affected behavior and conditioned literary production, and which hold for us a key to a fuller understanding of literature in its historical context.

Sociological criticism relates imaginative ideals to material interests. The demystification effected by the discovery of material interests does not rewrite but rather enhances the enduring work of idealization that poetic imagination performed on those motives, thus creating noble causes by which to live, dream, and even die. This is the peculiarity of the human condition: no matter how lowly the material motives that the historian is able to discover and analyze, every society is invested by its culture with something that heartens and inspires. Conscious motives overlie material interests through a rhetoric that verbalizes powerful ideals—an efficient rhetoric of “impure persuasion,” to use Kenneth Burke's felicitous phrase. But there are two sides to the dialectical coin of artistic representation, for poets and literati are the conscience of their society. Even while they join and serve the ruling power game by expressing it as a noble ideology, they also look at it critically and show its inner tensions and contradictions. Tristan, Lancelot, and Siegfried are superior to the system of their social group even while they mirror it and serve it. At the same time they are proud and humble, at the same time they serve and rule, operating as both victims and conquerors. Thus do their poets see them and present them to us.

Much literary sociology has been under the flag of a more or less explicit Marxism, but the serious problem of this orientation—so serious as to appear disqualifying—has been the tendency to reduce literary production to the instances of “commissioning” (by actual or potential patrons and “masters”) and “consumption” (by the intended or actual users/readers). These two instances have a recognizably determining role only in the cases of commercialized, aesthetically inadequate production. Within this frame of reference such a masterwork as the Divine Comedy would remain an unexplainable outsider, since it had neither a commissioner nor a specific audience. Although Marxist critics have been aware of this contradiction, their mental conditioning has continued to lead them to this same impasse since, if the structure is paramount, the superstructure must be not only dependent, hence secondary, but ultimately irrelevant or at least dispensable.

An offshoot of this orientation is the school of Frankfurt, whose main exponents, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horckheimer, have developed a view of avant-garde art and literature that can encompass much of the chivalric dream by insisting on art as negation of the world and affirmation of a utopia, a statement of faith in the individual in the face of the infamy of the existent. In particular, Benjamin's view of art as the “unceasing expectation of a miracle” clearly fits the dream of knight-errantry, with Perceval as its ultimate religious-metaphysical stage. The distance of poetry from mere existence is seen as a salutary indictment of what is evil and rotten in the latter. Asocial art (as the lyric is) thus becomes a saving social act, while all art is essentially wishful thinking. Given the apparent shortcomings of this school, with its projection of the present (and its perceived problems of modern alienation) into the past, this sophisticated type of sociological criticism is perhaps destined to remain a self-contained exercise.^[18]

We may recall Erich Auerbach's seminal judgments concerning the abstract and “absolute” quality of the Arthurian world as represented in the romances.^[19] Yet it can be shown that Arthurian courtesy (courtoisie ) lived in a dynamic symbiosis with a conscious social and moral commitment which contrasted with that world from within, and ultimately dissolved it. All this occurred while courtesy, an ethos that pursued its own social and literary development, conspired with “chivalry” and “courtliness” to form a triad of value systems that operated both inside and outside the world of chivalry. All the sundry possibilities came to fruition. The chivalry of the Perceval story entailed a metaphysical, mystical, and theological level of courtois refinement in an

effort to attain a supreme level of personal perfection. The courtliness of a Tristan, instead, involved personal survival in the real world of hostile social forces. Yvain, in turn, worked both inside and outside the Arthurian court to achieve a purposefulness that would satisfy the image of the whole man.

An impressive body of medieval literature is deeply pervaded by a sense of courtliness, chivalry, and courtesy. Much ink has been spilled on the presumed essence or unity of these ideals and, especially among German scholars, on the ethic of chivalry (ritterliches Tugendsystem ). But, rather than a unitary ethical system, an ideal nomenclature, a philosophy, or an educational pattern, the common ground of all this literature is an underlying social reality which linked heterogeneous groups through a somewhat vague yet powerful ideology. The ideology existed in the form of a common mentality even without a unitary verbal expression for it—a realization which should help us to dispose of such lingering polemics as, for instance, whether courtly love was only Gaston Paris's invention.

Beyond the literary forms that in shifting ways partook of the common themes, there were three types of “chivalry.” There was, first, a Christian knighthood, centered in northern France and reaching its consciousness in 1050–1100. This was followed by a courtly knighthood and, finally, a culture of courtly love. The latter two matured in southern France between 1100 and 1150, then quickly extended to northern France and beyond by 1150–1180. The three phenomena are distinct and partly antagonistic. Nonetheless, they converged and thrived side by side, leaving their imprints on ways of life and ways of thinking, feeling, speaking, writing, and reading for several centuries.

The identification of these three currents is similar to Carl Erdmann's 1935 thesis (Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, The Rise of the Crusade Idea), apparently endorsed by E. R. Curtius (European Literature 536), which explains Christian knighthood as arising out of the contrast between pagan Germanic warlike attitudes and the Church's sense of Christian meekness. French epics expressed this evolving knightly ethos in the two distinct forms of Christian transcendence and struggling baronial fealty, while Germanic epics incorporated the growing elements of courtesy over the substratum of a pagan military ethos. The courts of Provence and then Champagne and Flanders harbored a different knightly spirit that fed on the assimilation of service to the lord and service to the lady, thus combining chivalry and love. Similar mental states developed in other regions even before direct French influence.

Curtius (537) reminds us that Islam evolved both a knightly ideal and a theory of courtly love which showed “striking coincidences” with the West, Spain being a possible intermediary between the two continental cultures.

Taking his cue from the German sociologist Norbert Elias, the Germanist C. Stephen Jaeger has recently tendered a set of political, philosophical, and didactic documents that compel reconsideration of the development of “courtliness” and “courtesy,” including the two historical poles of Cicero's De officiis and Castiglione's Cortegiano.^[20] Drawing upon some elements of Jaeger's thesis, the research of Elias, the Romanist Erich Köhler, the social historian Georges Duby, the historians Maurice Keen and Lauro Martines, and others, I propose to explore the continuous vitality of curial and courtly traditions through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the way these traditions affected the development of three separate yet coexistent codes: (1) the courtly, (2) the chivalric/heroic, and (3) the chivalric/courtois. The third code combined the other two, adding to them the element of love, represented by a courtly-mannered knight who was motivated by both heroism and love in a state of harmonious symbiosis. The three codes belong to both social and literary spheres, and they often conspired in a tense, unstable mixture within various literary genres. Without ever coinciding with any of them, the codes govern the genres of (1) epic tales, (2) lyric poetry together with the romance, and (3) treatises on conduct and manners or etiquette. The cultural and literary contents of curiality or courtliness, chivalry or knighthood, and courtesy intersect with literary genres and constantly overlap them. To use H.-R. Jauss's schema, we are dealing with “dominants” which surfaced as constants in different literary forms, both shaping and threatening them from within.^[21] In a way, the codes were more “real” than the literary genres through which they operated: they constantly spilled over from genre to genre.

As we shall see, the inner tensions of the literature, reflecting the paradoxes of the social reality and its accompanying ideology, were rooted in the dual nature of both knighthood and courtliness: the denizens of the court were inherently torn between their servile status toward the lord and their exalted status as part of the power structure. They thought, felt, and operated as both free and unfree agents: free in their privileges vis-à-vis subjects and commoners, unfree vis-à-vis the masters. Even as servants they worked both to enact a superior will and for their own preferment, to become “lords” on their own. In their way, Arthur's knights share this duality with the courtiers of Castiglione.

Social background and ethical principles closely connect the culture of courtliness to the literature of courtesy. In fact, English usage merges—or confuses—the two when it refers to “courtly love” and “courtly literature.” For clarity's sake I shall use the terms as follows. Courtly and courtliness will refer to the social and cultural environment of princely courts, with the more special terms of curial and curiality (corresponding to Med. Lat. curialis, curialitas ) reserved for imperial chapels and episcopal courts. Knightly and knighthood will refer to the trained, horse-mounted warriors who formed a varied yet ideologically homogeneous group either within the titled and dubbed nobility or aspiring to become such—all these individuals operating mostly in courtly environments. Chivalry will be used for the ethico-ideological frame of mind that extended from knights to other classes and that informed patterns of behavior regarded as “noble.” Even though, English usage notwithstanding, courtliness and courtoisie are not the same thing, I shall use the formula “courtly love” for whatever cultural attitudes or products bear the stamp of the doctrine of sublimated and ennobling love which originated among the troubadours and in the Arthurian romances: the formula has currency and should cause no confusion. Courteous and courtesy (occasionally, for greater clarity, Fr. courtois, courtoisie ) will refer to the results of the civilizing process (connected with both courtliness and chivalry) whereby respect for others' feelings and interests was expected as acceptable behavior and a sign of noble nature. The literature of manners which is part of this study, and which translated the ideals of courtesy into specific norms, shared all the ideological features just mentioned.

Three levels of reality will confront us: (1) the social structures; (2) the ethical framework invoked by rulers, diplomats, statesmen, and their close associates; (3) the behavioral ideology affecting such diverse yet closely associated personages as chaplains, bishops, courtiers, chancery functionaries, knights, and court poets. The texts will show convergences and divergences between these levels of reality, as well as styles of life, thought, and writing. Our readings will focus on the relationship between poetics and historical meta-ethics, understanding the latter as analysis of the language of ethics. For this purpose I shall pursue the surfacing of moral concepts in certain literary forms, and the way such texts incorporated the supporting moral judgments that suited their societies' expectations. I shall attempt to interpret events, ideas, and stylistic forms that most directly pertain to the life and thoughts of medieval and Renaissance courts and their denizens, mainly the upper

and lower nobility with the surrounding functionaries. These patterns of behavior will be shown to have acted as models for other social layers, principally in the burgher townships.

The literature that concerns us grew in social spheres of varying kinds at different times and places, but it was always affected by the presence of clergy and aristocracy as producers or consumers, authors or audiences. Feudal nobility does differ from Renaissance and post-Renaissance aristocracy, and this is reflected in the culture, art, and literature, but social settings must be kept in mind in order to understand the specific import of themes and motifs that may occasionally sound as timeless rhetorical topoi. For even the latter owe their vitality and endurance to their responsiveness to concrete expressive needs, although the eminent investigator of the durability of topoi, E. R. Curtius, did not focus on this vital relationship. Lack of detailed evidence on producers and publics notwithstanding, we can assume that most producers were the intelligentsia of the day, chiefly the clerics and then, progressively, a mix of clerics and noblemen or their direct clients.

This is not to deny the presence of a popular layer in the production of medieval and Renaissance literature. Historians who stress orality of production and transmission, typically Paul Zumthor and, in an independent way, Mikhail Bakhtin, appear to assign a considerable role to commoners as active public, viewing them rather as the German Romantics used to view the Volk. What I shall try to do here, above all, is to recapture medieval meanings, whereas Zumthor, in whose discourse meaning plays no appreciable role, chiefly strives to hear medieval voices.^[22] More specifically, Zumthor suggests a reading of all medieval poetry according to a sharp opposition between a written literature (stricto sensu the only “literature”), which began around Chrétien de Troyes, no earlier than 1160, and all that other poetry which until at least the end of the fifteenth century continued to be orally produced and orally transmitted.^[23] All of this would oppose a largely “popular” public of producers and consumers of oral literature to a distinct élite public of written literature.

Another way to discover the popular inspiration in medieval or Renaissance literature is to join Mikhail Bakhtin's search for what he called comic realism. Such a register is of limited interest to the present discourse since, except for stressing the joie de vivre that was typical of some Renaissance literature—especially Rabelais—Bakhtin's “popular comic” is not a special response to historical and social circumstances: it is beyond time, hence it cannot help our effort to historicize. Bakhtin

sees Rabelais's laughter as essentially unconnected with the dominant ideas of contemporaneous aristocracy, clergy, or bourgeoisie. Like Zumthor's common man of the street, Bakhtin's “people” enact in carnival festivities a nonchalant realism that is absolutely egalitarian, whereas official literature stages the triumph of the ruling social hierarchy. Nevertheless, both elements are relevant to a proper reading of our literature since the two mix in the jongleur, and this mixture demands interpretation in order to explain some apparent contradictions or exceptions that do not derive from the inherent contrast between the “official” codes. The utopic element of the carnival can be related to the utopic element of the Arthurian world and the knightly (even Quixotic) ideals as a way to turn the world of official values upside down. Bakhtin has recalled how the egalitarian aspect of absolutism resulted in an alliance with the popular spirit of the carnival in a way that affected everyday life as well as literary expression in such attacks on feudal aristocratic privileges as Peter the Great's symbolic cutting of the boyars' beards, or Ivan the Terrible's establishment of the personal royal demesne under a special personal police and bodygard (oprichnina ).^[24] We shall see direct analogies in Louis XIV's method of taming the French nobility, and we shall see how this general process directly affected the literature that concerns us.

The discrete codes of the clergy, the feudal nobility, the knights, and the courtiers coexisted by juxtaposing inherited ancient standards and Christian ideology, in a dynamic tension that produced a certain degree of contradiction in the literature but also lent it much of its mysterious fascination—part of its poetic appeal even at this chronological remove. This dynamism of ideas and forms makes up the contextual message through its linguistic surface and literary style. The dialectical game played by the coming together of ancient naturalism and Christian spirituality contributed to produce a style of antitheses and oxymora as well as a psychology of instability and conflict—the supreme example being Francesco Petrarca as originator of the centuries-long tradition of “Petrarchism.”

The major literary genres to be explored as hosts of chivalric ideals are the epic, the romance, and the lyric. Speaking of the epic in 1948, E. R. Curtius recalled Max Scheler's identification of the five basic anthropological/ethical values (the holy, the intellectual, the noble, the useful, and the pleasant) corresponding to five “personal value types” (the saint, the genius, the hero, the leader, and the artist). He then ob-

served that “a comparative phenomenology of heroism, heroic poetry, and the heroic ideal is yet to be given us.”^[25] Forty years of research may not have brought us much closer to fulfilling this desideratum. The following is a comparative and interdisciplinary discussion of textual data relating to the sense of nobility, heroism, and models of civilized behavior, toward a reconstruction of the ideology of medieval and Renaissance ruling classes. Some hesitation might be caused by the historians' insistence that the terms of nobility, knighthood, chivalry, and courtliness can be used meaningfully only with careful qualifications as to regional and chronological varieties.^[26] It is difficult to define at any given time and place who exactly was a nobleman, a knight, or a courtier, and what this status precisely meant legally, institutionally, and in practical consequences. Yet all specialists are aware that, aside from local predicaments, the mental structures that operated on the level of perception, feeling, and practical behavior enjoyed a surprising pervasiveness and endurance. These structures were as much the function of material conditions as of imaginative roles created and promulgated by a massive literary tradition. A sensible degree of generalization seems, therefore, legitimate and even necessary if we are to understand the common factors in a host of complex cultural phenomena. The most problematic relationship may be between medieval and Renaissance courtiers. Even there, however, it is to be hoped that the following exposition will show significant elements of real continuity without prejudice to all the intervening historical changes.

In its broadest form, my theme is the literary and cultural role of the European nobility in the sense of a convergence of two distinct, occasionally opposite functions: the warrior ethic versus the ethic of courtliness and courtesy. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the centripetal forces of the absolutist state forced the nobility to give up its belligerence in favor of a sharper concentration on its role as model of politesse, high culture, and social refinement. But in the Middle Ages the culture of courtliness and courtesy had managed to combine the two ethics: the knight was both a brave warrior and an artistic lover. Chrétien de Troyes's Erec et Enide and Yvain confronted the problem inherent in this uneasy association from the two opposite ends: the ideal noble knight must be a great fighter to be a worthy lover, but can hardly be both at the same time. Erec forgot his knightly duty for too much dallying with Enide, whereas, conversely, Yvain forgot his wife while pursuing his knightly adventures. The paradox was evident and dra-

matic: we must fight to qualify for love, yet we cannot love while we fight. By the very nature of the genre, lyricists chose to concentrate on loving, always subsuming the fighting qualities. I could summarily show the multiple oppositions by saying that for the people around the Nibelungenlied' s King Gunther, love is only a marginal source of warfare: they fight much more than they love. For King Arthur's people, instead, valorous fighting is propaedeutic to worthy love. But for most troubadours, fighting is a rather accidental and unwelcome interruption to lovemaking. We thus have an opposition between epic and lyric, with the romance standing in between and trying to harmonize the two in a difficult, problematic, and precarious balance.

A significant element in literary history is the growth and refinement of the psychological content. In its most impressive outcomes it has become a trademark of French literature, from Chrétien de Troyes to Marcel Proust and beyond. This exquisite psychologism is in good part the result of a social condition, the centrality of the court in the life of the French nation: sheer survival demanded close observation of the behavioral traits of one's peers, allies or rivals as they might be, yet not as individuals, as we might be tempted to surmise, but rather “as human beings in relation to others, as individuals in a social situation.”^[27]

The study of literature gains by balancing our concern for singularity and uniqueness with the collective semantic context that made the individual works intelligible and meaningful. Both traditional historians and literary critics tend to emphasize uniqueness, hence to isolate practical deeds and literary works in their individual peculiarities. Elias objects that our interest in individuals is really conditioned by their having played a part in social entities of one kind or another,^[28] and Georges Duby agrees.^[29] Similarly, we attribute importance to certain works of literature because they play a role in specific cultural patterns which they represent, and from which they cannot be abstracted without loss of meaning and relevance.

A sociologist with a many-faceted background of medical, psychological, and, as a student of Edmund Husserl, philosophical studies, Elias proposes a reading of cultural phenomena on the basis of sociological “figurations” that explain not only the historical roles of individuals and groups but also the deep meanings of their self-images as expressed in cultural products. By contrast, he criticizes traditional historians for a failure to understand that unique historical situations, events, and personalities can become the object of scientific analysis

only if seen in their relationship to the collective consciousness of social groups.

Elias describes changes in human sensibility as part of a civilizing process that required the taming of emotions and resulted from the development of self-consciousness: the acceptance of a social code of behavior went hand in hand with learning to discipline the emotions. Civilization as self-control overcame, through a growing aptitude for introspection, the more primitive and barbarous self-expressive spontaneity of feudal society, as individuals eventually attained a realization of self-identity qua members of a civilized society. Social institutions changed together with the collective mentalities.

What Elias calls “the court society” came to maturity under Louis XIV. His study of aristocracies and courts discloses interests and tensions that explain how the particular themes that emerged in such societies took specific expressive forms. We can then understand how such cultural ideologies as courtliness, chivalry, and courtesy in the Middle Ages, the courtliness of the Renaissance signories and principalities (most typically, the kind envisaged by Castiglione), the strict codification of the aristocratic/bourgeois courts of the French kings from Henry IV to Louis XIV down to the Revolution, and finally the model of the despotic Prussian court of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all have something in common even while they are unique in their precise social and cultural makeup. The reasons for such apparently unrelated phenomena as the confrontation of the Weimar Republic by National Socialism and then the latter's method of governing in a way that seemed chaotic and self-contradictory are explained by certain habits of public and psychological behavior. The period that concerns us was characterized by the coexistence, in a state of constant competition, of forms of feudal aristocracy, monarchic centralization, and relative democracy. It is therefore relevant to keep in mind how some recent societies failed in their struggle to survive the challenge of representative government and yielded to the apparent peacefulness of princely management of public affairs where the inner conflicts were handled behind the scenes of closed aristocratic courts. In the Prussian state, for one,

state affairs were carried on essentially at the princely court. The rivalries, differences of opinion, and conflicts  . . . were confined to the inner circle. They were often conducted behind closed doors. At any rate, up to 1870 and in some cases up to 1918, the mass of the German people had little opportunity to participate in such arguments with a sense of shared responsibility.

The personality structure of many citizens was adjusted to this way . . .. Many Germans felt distinctly uncomfortable when, after 1918, the arguments about the management of state affairs  . . . now took place far more in public view, and when they themselves were required to take part in these discussions.”^[30]

We can easily see that Elias's approach demonstrates how knowledge of the past is the best way to understand some essential aspects of the present, for, in final analysis, the past is present.