COURTESY BOOKS
. Broadly defined as vernacular works for lay audiences that teach etiquette,
comportment, and moral values according to gender and social class, courtesy books
include works in a variety of genres written from the 12th to the 15th century. Drawing
on biblical and historical exempla, the dicta of Cato and Solomon, precepts of the church
fathers, proverbs, and contemporary literature and customs, the authors of courtesy
literature defined appropriate behavior for men and women of a specified rank.
Among the oldest vernacular didactic works is the Occitan ensenhamen of Garin le
Brun (second half of the 12th c.); eight other courtly didactic poems of this genre are
extant. The oldest estates poem, the Livre des manières by Étienne de Fougères (late 12th
c.), dedicated to the countess of Hereford, expounds the roles and laments the failings of
kings, clergy, knights, peasants, bourgeois, and both virtuous and immoral women.
Courtesy literature flourished in the 13th century, as the royalty and the aristocracy
sought to foster noble conduct in their families. St. Louis wrote separate letters of
instruction to his son and to his daughters. At the behest of Philip III, Egidio Colonna
(Giles of Rome) wrote De regimine principum for the future Philip IV the Fair.
Translated into French in the late 13th century as the Livre du gouvernement des rois, this
work has chapters on the domestic duties of women and the education of children, as well
as on the rectitude of princes and civil and military government. A royal “mirror” for
princesses, the Speculum dominarum by Durand de Champagne, was translated into
French as the Miroir des dames in nine 14th-and 15th-century manuscripts before its
adaptation by Ysambert de Saint-Léger in the Renaissance. Two works addressed to the
lesser nobility, the anonymous Urbain li Courtois (second half of the 13th c.; eight
manuscripts) and the Enseignements de Robert de Ho (1260?), conveyed lessons in
courtesy and comportment from father to son: honor God and parents, avoid taverns and
loose women, don’t scratch in public. Both of these short treatises were composed in
Anglo-Norman in octosyllabic rhyming couplets. Other late-medieval treatises on
manners are preserved in only a single manuscript each: the Apprise de nurture (237
lines), Bon enfant (eighty-nine lines), Edward (332 lines), and Petit traitise de nurture
(190 lines).
Following the lead of Perceval’s mother in Chrétien’s Conte du graal, poems like
Raoul de Houdenc’s Roman des eles (first third of the 13th c.) and Ordene de chevalerie
(second half of the 13th c.) instructed knights in the moral lessons of chivalry. Three brief
poems about table manners, the Contenances de table, dating from the late 13th to the
15th century and deriving from a Latin model linked to the Liber faceti, counseled
cleanliness and polite behavior at table.
Courtesy literature sharply segregated roles for men and women, as seen in Robert de
Blois, who wrote didactic verse for aristocratic patrons in the mid-13th century. His
Enseignement des princes is a sober Christian allegory of princely virtues; the
Chastoiement des dames alternates between stern moralizing and courtly banter about
women’s amorous activities. The enticing threat of female sexuality is a recurrent motif
in these works: in Urbain, men are advised to marry illiterate women, who are more
likely to be faithful.
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