1. " . . .ipsa scola, quae interpretatur disciplina, id est correctio, dicitur quae alios habitu, incessu, verbo et actu atque totius bonitatis continentia corrigat." Hincmar, Epist. syn. Karisiac. 12, Monumenta Germaniae Historica [hereafter MGH ], Leges 2, Capit. 2, p. 436, ll. 2-6, cited by Jaeger (1987): 609. For a magisterial presentation on medieval courts, especially in Italy, see Aurelio Roncaglia, "Le corti medievali," in A. Asor Rosa, ed., Letteratura italiana 1 (1982): 33-147.

2. But on Ottonian government see, notably, Karl J. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (1979; 1989), and idem, "Ottonian Government," English Historical Review 96 (1981): 722-753.

3. For a fuller appreciation of medieval humanism Jaeger brings forward, for example, Erdmann's rich surveys and editions of letters from the period of Henry IV, remarking (119) that a study of "the motifs of these letters as forerunners of the main themes at the French humanist schools in the earlier twelfth century is still to be written. It is a rich topic." See Carl Erdmann, Studien zur Briefliteratur Deutschlands im 11. Jahrhundert, MGH, Schriften 1 (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1938); C. Erdmann and N. Fickermann, eds., Briefsammlungen der Zeit Heinrichs IV, MGH, Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 5 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1950).

4. Jaeger (1987): 587. See Margaret T. Gibson, "The artes in the Eleventh Century," in Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge. Actes du 4 ^e Congrès international de philosophie médiévale, Montréal, Institut d'études médiévales, 1967 (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1969 [c1968]): 121-126; idem, "The Continuity of Learning circa 850—circa 1050," Viator 6 (1975): 1-13.

5. Fleckenstein, Early Medieval Germany (1978): 154 f.

6. Similarly, while investigating this ideal of a harmoniously literate and moral education in the teaching of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists, A. Grafton and L. Jardine (1986) have found that it was effected by "lived emulation of a teacher who projects the cultural ideal above and beyond the drilling he provides in curriculum subjects" (27, with specific reference to Guarino Veronese). This was achieved, these historians claim, despite the absence of an explicit moral content in a curriculum that insisted chiefly on careful, philologically correct reading of classical authors.

7. Vita Angelrani 3 in PL 141: 1406a. Jaeger (1987): 586, note 62.

8. Jaeger (1987): 581 f., quoting from Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopi Carnotensis Metalogicon, ed. Clemens Webb (1929), 1, Prol., p. 4, and 1.24, p. 55: "Illa autem que ceteris philosophie partibus preminet, Ethicam dico, sine qua nec philosophi subsistit nomen, collati decoris gratia omnes alias antecedit"; and from Onulf of Speyer, Colores rhetorici (1071-1076), ed. W. Wattenbach, Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1894) 361-386 at 369: " . . . arti rhetoricae: morum elegantiam, compositionem habitus, vitae dignitatem amplectere," which Jaeger translates as "elegant manners, composed bearing, and dignity of conduct," given as goals of rhetorical instruction.

9. The exemplary text is De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia 4: see F. Petrarca, Opere latine, ed. Antonietta Bufano, 2 vols. (Torino: UTET, 1975) 2: 1106-1108. See Jerome Taylor, " Fraunceys Petrak and the Logyk of Chaucer's Clerk," in A. Scaglione, ed., Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1975): 364-383 at 372-374.

10. "Onde i buon pedagoghi non solamente insegnano lettere ai fanciulli, ma ancora boni modi ed onesti nel mangiare, bere, parlare, andare, con certi gesti accommodati." Cortegiano 4.12, trans. Singleton 297; see Jaeger: 231. John W. Baldwin, "Masters at Paris from 1179 to 1215: A Social Perspective," in Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982; 1985): 151-158 shows the linkage between advanced education and the attainment of governmental and ecclesiastical high careers around 1200.

11. Jaeger: chap. 8, "The Language of Courtesy," 127-175.

12. N. Elias, Power and civility (1982): 258-270, "The Courtization of Warriors" (" Die Verhöflichung der Krieger" ). For the German area, see J. Bumke, Knighthood in the Middle Ages (1982): 156 on the study of rulers' ethic; the texts edited by W. Berges; and the studies by K. Bosl, G. H. Hagspiel, U. Hoffmann, E. Kleinschmidt, H. Kloft, W. Störmer, and H. Wolfram in my References.

13. See Andreae Capellani Regii Francorum De amore libri tres, ed. E. Trojel (Copenhagen: Gad, 1892; rpt. Munich: 1972); Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941; Frederick Ungar, 1957; Norton, 1969): 159-162, 241, 285 f.

14. Jaeger: 153 f., 160, and 147-149.

15. "A letter of the authors expounding his whole intention in the course of this worke" in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, eds. Edwin Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932-1957). See, on the broad historical context of this famous passage, S. Greenblatt (1980): "To Fashion a Gentleman: Spenser and the Destruction of the Bower of Bliss," 157-192.

16. See word frequency count and semantic history in Jaeger: 129-133. The lack of a true Provençal or Old French equivalent for the given acceptation of Medieval Latin disciplina, Middle High German zuht, and Middle English discipline points to the German origin of this central notion for the code of courtesy (Jaeger: 132). It will help to clarify the exact import of zuht, a very common term in Middle High German literature, if we bear in mind that its modern form, Zucht, still carries the complex and variable meaning of good breeding, including both education and good family origin, culture, discipline, honesty, chastity, and modesty, while its old antithesis unzuht, unzucht, meant lasciviousness and lechery.

17. On the "twilight of the Gods" climate of the late cycles down to Sir Thomas Malory's (d. 1471) Le Morte Darthur (or d'Arthur ) see, for example, Eugene Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (1984).

18. I quote from Testard's edition of De officiis as Les devoirs (1965), where, interestingly enough, this comitas is translated with "courtoisie."

19. "Sequitur ut de una reliqua parte honestatis dicendum sit, in qua uerecundia et quasi quidam ornatus uitae, temperantia et modestia omnisque sedatio perturbationum animi et rerum modus cernitur. Hoc loco continetur id quod dici latine decorum potest, graece enim prepon dicitur decorum. Huius uis ea est ut ab honesto non queat separari; nam et quod decet honestum est, et quod honestum est decet . . . . Similis est ratio fortitudinis. Quod enim uiriliter animoque magno fit, id dignum uiro et decorum uidetur, quod contra, id ut turpe, sic indecorum."

"Quocirca poetae in magna uarietate personarum, etiam uitiosis quid conueniat et quid deceat, uidebunt, nobis autem cum a natura constantiae, moderationis, temperantiae, uerecundiae partes datae sint cumque eadem natura doceat non neglegere quemadmodum nos aduersus homines geramus, efficitur ut et illud quod ad omnem honestatem pertinet, decorum quam late fusum sit, appareat et hoc quod spectatur in uno quoque genere uirtutis."

"Omnes participes sumus rationis praestantiaeque eius qua antecellimus bestiis, a qua omne honestum decorumque trahitur et ex qua ratio inueniendi officii exquiritur." (Translations in the text are mine.)

20. Jaeger (1987): 592-598, with supporting quotations from Richard W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), and Beryl Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools: A Study of Intellectuals and Politics (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973).

21. MGH, Scriptores [hereafter MGH, SS] 20: 562, 11. 9 f., cited by Jaeger (1987): 593, note 90.

22. Discussing Edward Pechter, "The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama" ( PMLA 102, 1987: 292-303), Ben Ross Schneider, Jr. (Letter to the Editor, PMLA 103, 1988: "Forum," 60 f.) recalls Karl Marx's somewhat nostalgic denunciation of the capitalistic bourgeoisie of the Renaissance for sweeping away feudal and patriarchal family ties, religious and chivalric idealism, and respect toward "natural superiors" and timehonored occupations, while it replaced them inexorably with the cold monetary rewards and the irresponsible freedoms of free trade ( Communist Manifesto, Chicago: Regnery, 1954: 12 f.). Renaissance texts, Schneider contends, must be interpreted by understanding the ideology of the ruling class that they rationalized. He suggests that "this ideology is to be found very close to home, in the European idea of a gentleman, so much admired by Conrad, Hemingway, and Faulkner," claiming that this ideology "originates in the Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice melded with the ancient concept of honor." One crucial text that both old and new historicists have neglected, Schneider adds, is Cicero's De officiis, "the most important moral authority of the period, well known to every schoolchild," whereas, according to Schneider, "they prefer to fix on such details as the apparently self-serving aspects of Castiglione's sprezzatura, while ignoring the thrust of his book as a whole . . . . The task of assembling the ideology of the ruling class in the Renaissance is still before us," concludes Schneider.

23. On the use of Cicero within the perspective of "civic humanism" see Baron, "Cicero and the Roman Civic Spirit" (1938).

24. The motif, Jaeger (237) reminds us, had a long life in European literature: even Stendhal's Fabrizio del Dongo serves the Prince of Parma precisely with the intent of obtaining a bishopric.

25. R. E. Latham, ed., Dictionary of Medieval Latin (London: Oxford University Press, 1975-[Letter C 1981, Letter D 1986]), gives as basic meanings for curialitas: "a) courtliness, refinement, sophistication; b) courtesy, favor, (act of) graciousness; c) gratuity, free gift"; and for curialis: "municipal official (Isidore, Etymologiae: 9.4.24), courtier of royal or magnate's court, subordinate."

26. Weitere Brief e Meinhards no. 1 in C. Erdmann, ed.: Briefsammlungen der Zeit Henrichs IV (1950): 193. See Jaeger (1987): 598, with more texts.

27. Jaeger (1987): 596 f., with texts and examples. Hugh's text is from De institutione novitiorum, PL 176: 925-952 at 935B-D: "disciplina  . . . est membrorum omnium motus ordinatus et dispositio decens in omni habitu et actione, . . . frenum lasciviae, elationis jugum, vinculum iracundiae, quae domat intemperantiam  . . . et omnes inordinatos motus mentis atque illicitos appetitos suffocat. Sicut enim de inconstantia mentis nascitur inordinata motio corporis, ita quoque dum corpus per disciplinam stringitur, animus ad constantiam solidatur." The term disciplina looms large in Hugh's text: chaps. 10 through 21 deal with "disciplina in actu et in gestu, in loquendo, in mensa, in cibo."

28. "In quo ergo animae decor? An forte in eo quod honestum dicitur?  . . . Cum autem decoris huius claritas abundantius intima cordis repleverit, prodeat foras necesse est  . . . pulchritudo animae palam erit." Sermo super Canticum 85: 10-11, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, eds. Jean Leclerq and H. M. Rochais (1957-1977): 2; (1958): 314; quoted by Jaeger (1987): 599.

29. Jaeger: 128 f., 136. Herbord's text is now in the Warsaw edition by Wikarjak and Liman (1974).

30. In the Middle Ages the basic text for all this was, once again, Cicero's De officiis (Jaeger 103-116), but the opposition urbanus/rusticus, underlying the distinction between the literate and the illiterate registers of speakers of Latin, was a constant of ancient culture. Even in Rome it went back to archaic times: Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 6.3.105, relates Cato's definition of homo urbanus as the one who speaks correctly, aptly, and wittily— facetus and lepidus, to use Plautus's adjectives. See Eugène de Saint-Denis, "Évolution sémantique de urbanus-urbanitas," Latomus 3 (1939): 5-24, and Edwin S. Ramage, Urbanitas: Ancient Sophistication and Refinement (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973). For the broad sociological implications, see, for example, Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Vintage Books, c1976, 1978).

31. Joannis Lemovicensis abbatis de Zirc 1208-1218 Opera omnia (1932): 1: 71-126. Johannes, abbot of a Cistercian monastery at Zirc in Hungary for a time, addressed his work to Count Theobald IV of Champagne. For Jaeger (91-95) this impressive text, which "deserves a new critical edition and a serious and informed commentary," has been regularly misunderstood by historians and critics.

32. Jaeger: 55; see Damiani's text in PL: 145: 463-472.

33. Flori (1986): 158 f. Flori's whole chapter 15 "Critiques de la chevalerie," 331-338, goes over the abundant literature inspired by the spirit of ecclesiastical and social reform.

34. See this in Thomas Wright, ed., The Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets and Epigrammatists of the Twelfth Century (London: Longman, 1872).

35. Jaeger: 58 and note 279.

36. John of Salisbury's Policraticus contains two chapters on the definition of civilitas (book 8, chaps. 10-11; Webb ed.: 2: 284-306). See, also, Policraticus 1.4 against courtly culture, specifically the practice of hunting, as aesthetically attractive but little more than an expression of frivolity and vanity (Webb: 1:21-35).

37. Aeneae Silvii de curialium miseriis epistola (1928). Peter of Blois's text is his epistle 14, PL: 207: 42-51. See, also, the "Dialogus inter dehortantem a curia et curialem," st. 7, in Peter Dronke, "Peter of Blois and Poetry at the Court of Henry II," Medieval Studies 38 (1976): 208. For Jaeger (58) the existence of such polemical literature is proof that the type of court cleric portrayed in the episcopal vitae was not a literary fiction but a social reality.

38. De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae chap. 12.40, in S. Bernardi Opera, eds. Jean Leclerq and H. M. Rochais, 3 (1963): 1-59 at 46. Jaeger: 171.

In the tenth and eleventh centuries the Cluniacs had been in the forefront of the movement for Church reform, consequently, of resistance and opposition to courtliness, seen only negatively as hypocrisy, worldliness, corruption, and effeminacy. But in due course Cluny became widely regarded as a center of refinement (see, typically, Boccaccio's stories on the abbot of Cluny as a paragon of liberality and good living: Decameron 1.7; 10.2), and so it was seen by the Carthusians and Cistercians: the history of architecture is a running commentary on the critical stance of the Cistercians' stern, spiritual Gothic versus the worldly, earth-bound, and ornate Romanesque of the Cluniacs. The order of Cîteaux became the leader of austere reform when St. Bernard took over the center of Clairvaux in Champagne in 1115.

39. "Mimos et magos et fabulatores, scurrilesque cantilenas atque ludorum spectacula, tanquam vanitates et insanias falsas respuunt et abominantur." De laude novae militiae, PL: 182: 926. See his definition of a good bishop's true virtues as essentially chastity, charity, and humility in the letter "De moribus et officio episcoporum ad Henricum Senonensem archiepiscopum" of circa 1127 ( PL: 182: 809 ff.), addressed to the archbishop of Sens, who had come to his office from a career at court.

40. Marc Bloch, La société féodale (1939-1940): 2: 152.

41. "Fateor quidem, quod sanctum est domino regi assistere" (440D); "Principibus placuisse viris non ultima laus est" (441B; see Horace, Epistolae: 1.17.35); "non solum laudabile, sed gloriosum reputo domino regi assistere, procurare rempublicam, sui esse immemorem, et omnium totum esse" (441C: see Jaeger: 84).

42. Facetus, edited by A. Morel-Fatío, Romania 15 (1886): 224-235. See Ingeborg Glier, Artes amandi (1971): 18-20.

43. I differ from Jaeger's translation (167): "Retain your modest restraint even when speaking falsehoods."

44. I. Glier, Artes amandi (1971): 18-20.

45. Günter Eifler, ed., Ritterliches Tugendsystem (1970); Gustav Ehrismann, "Die Grundlagen des ritterlichen Tugendsystems" (1919): 137-216; idem, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (1972); E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1963): 522-530. See, now, Jörg Arentzen and Uwe Ruberg, eds., Die Ritteridee in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters: eine kommentierte Anthologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987).

46. Holmberg 82: see Curtius, European Literature (1963): 529.

47. J. Flori (1986) 17, 277-280. Flori concludes that the polemic between Curtius and Ehrismann was satisfactorily resolved in a sort of compromise by Daniel Rocher's studies (1964, 1966, 1968).

48. For example, Daniel Rocher's and Gert Kaiser's studies (1966; 1986).

49. Jaeger's relationship to Elias's work raises questions that involve the method of "history of ideas." Jaeger (9) claims that, although his own presentation issues from Elias's, "Elias sees courtesy as a product of certain social changes, a response to conditions. I maintain just the contrary: courtesy is in origin an instrument of the urge to civilizing, of the forces in which that process originates, and not an outgrowth of the process itself." Thus, he sees the birth of the curial ethic as essentially a matter of conceptual thrust in a civilizing movement, and blames Elias for grounding this ideology in social circumstances. Yet, the real matter is one of convergence of experience and culture, so that Jaeger may be faulted for what Lauro Martines (1979: 126-128) calls "the [occasionally] abstract cerebrations of [some] historians of ideas" (my additions). As I read it, Jaeger's later paper of 1987 seems to come around to a different assessment of his research's methodological import where he says: "I stress that this type, the ideal educated bishop, the courtier bishop, was not in its origins a product of shaping ideas, but rather of political and social circumstances which favored the rediscovery and revival of those ideas. An office in the Ottonian imperial church system required a statesman/orator/ administrator to fill it, and from that office and its requirements, an educational program, the cultivation of virtues in the old learning, took its major impetus in our period [i.e., 1000-1150]" (594 f.; Jaeger also refers to his "The Courtier Bishop in Vitae from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century," Speculum 58 [1983]: 291-325). He thus seems to have moved from an essentially "history of ideas" position to a practically sociological one—in substance, Elias's very own.

50. See the review of Jaeger's book by Gerald A. Bond, Romance Philology 42.4 (1989): 479-485 at 483.

51. Jaeger (1987): 599-601, citing P. G. Walsh, "Alan of Lille as a Renaissance Figure," Studies in Church History 14 (1977): 117-135; Michael Wilks, "Alan of Lille and the New Man," Studies in Church History 14 (1977): 137-157; and Linda Marshall, "The Identity of the 'New Man' in the Anticlaudianus of Alan of Lille," Viator 10 (1979): 77-94.

52. Secretum Secretorum: Nine English Versions, ed. M. A. Manzaloni, Early English Texts Society no. 276 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977): 1: 79 f.

53. "Ipse etiam fratrum commoda sepius amplius decrevit . . .." Chronicon Hildesheimense [Chronicon episcoporum Hildesheimensium], MGH, Scriptores 7 (Hannover: Hahn, 1846): 845-873 at 853 par. 16. "Eo  . . . presidente irrepsit ambitiosa curialitas, quae  . . . disciplinae mollito rigore claustri claustra relaxavit." Fundatio ecclesiae Hildesheimensis, ed. Adolf Hofmeister: MGH, SS 30.2: 939-946. Second text quoted by Jaeger: 153 f., 160, from this latter edition: chap. 5, 945, 12 ff.

54. "rex filium suum  . . . beato Thomae cancellario commisit alendum, et moribus et curialitatibus informandum,"in [Matthew Paris (1200-1259)] Matthaei Parisiensis, monachi Sancti Albani, Historia Anglorum, sive, ut vulgo dicitur, Historia minor. Item, ejusdem Abbreviatio chronicorum Angliae, ed. Frederic Madden, Rolls Series no. 44, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1866-1869): 1: 316, cited by Jaeger (1987): 612, n. 126. Each term has its individual history: the important term disciplina, for example, had a pertinent connotation in France as early as in Hincmar of Reims, while Jaeger (130-131) finds the first occurrence of it in a context of good manners in the Ruodlieb, commonly dated between 1030 and 1050, although Jaeger (122) prefers Karl Hauk's later dating between 1042 and 1070.

55. Cortes, it is worth noting, appears in Arnaut Daniel's speech in Dante's Purgatorio 26: 140.

56. There has recently been a lively interest in lexical and semantic studies concerning the extent and value of terms relating to knighthood, chivalry, and courtesy, with results still to be assessed on a comparative basis. For the Provençal epic language see, for example, Linda Paterson, "Knights and the Concept of Knighthood in the Twelfth-Century Occitan Epic," Forum for Modern Language Studies 17.2 (1981): 115-130, who takes her point of departure from Jean Flori's studies and quantitative methods.

Similarly, the ethical and the juridical vocabulary deserve parallel study for the light they can throw on each other. The feudal "mentality" has been reconstructed in part by analyzing the changes in Latin and vernacular terms referring to property and interpersonal attitudes: see, for example, the semantic studies by K. J. Hollyman, Le développement du vocabulaire féodal en France pendant Ie haut moyen âge (Genève, Paris: E. Droz, 1957). The nomenclatures of the "virtues" of the lords, their vassals, their courtiers, the knights, and so on, appear largely interchangeable with those advocated for the courtly lover and the chivalric hero of literature, but with significant semantic shifts, some of which I shall pursue. See G. Duby's strictures about Hollyman's important study in "La féodalité? Une mentalité médiévale," Annales 14.4 (1958): 765-771, reprinted in Hommes et structures (1973): 103-110.

57. Du Cange gives maneria, maneries for modus, ratio, with Abelard's logical acceptation of genus (De generibus et speciebus: "genera id est manerias"). See Adolf Tobler and Erhard Lommatzsch, Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch 5 (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1963): maniere, meniere < Medieval Latin man(u)arius with the still current meanings of guise, "properly set mode," and "habit and mores" documented since the twelfth century as in "mout cuidoit chanter par maniere," "les ges et la maniere," and "n'avoir meniere" = to be immoderate, extravagant, without sense of proportion: "tant qu'il n'avoit meniere."

58. For example, M. Keen (1984): 121-123.

59. K. Foster, The Two Dantes (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978): 20.

60. See, out of an abundant literature, Joan M. Ferrante, " Cortes'amor in Medieval Texts," Speculum 55 (1980): 686-695.