The father sleeps, the sons speak. The law of the father rewritten in "The Book of the Courtier"

Abstract

The essay examines the birth of the fraternal order, that is ‘democracy’ in its widest sense, in a key text of the Renaissance, Baldassarre Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. Here courtiers reunited one evening at the Urbino court steadily create a position of power for themselves by disposing of the father figure of Duke Guidubaldo while suppressing their own rivalries and fashioning a common ideal I. Just as patriarchy, however, this essay argues that the collaborative regime of the brother is constructed on the silencing of women—sisters, wives, and mothers—and not just the court ladies of the early 16th century.