The Reactor Core now hosts a copy of The Book of the Courtier, by Baldessar Castilio. The book was taken from the Renascence Editions website and cleaned up a bit. Pictures were taken out, the sidenotes were removed, HTML was cleaned up, and all four books were integrated into one big page.
I heard about the book from the ONE and the MANY, by Rousas John Rushdoony. I quote his review here:
Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), courtier, diplomat, soldier, and author, write, in The Courtier (written 1508-1516, first printed in 1528, four years before Machiavelli's The Prince), a classic statement of the ideal Renaissance man. The influence of The Courtier on European standards has been very great. Very quickly translated into English, "it became famous as the perfect guide for young members of the English Establishment practically until Edward VII's times." Castiglione himself represented the standard he taught: he "became a man of varied accomplishments, in all of which he was good but in none of which he was uncouth enough to excel." [1]
Castiglione's courtier is a man of the world, urbane, sensitive, and responsive to every wind of influential opinion and observation. He is formally for all things — church, state, family, and society — but substantially he is only for himself, not in any crude, egoistic sense, but in the sense that the true universal is not to be found in religion or in the state, but in the individual man. Similarly, he shall seek in a woman, not a particular person or gross sensual satisfaction, but again a realization of a universal…
— the ONE and the MANY, by Rousas John Rushdoony (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, 1978), p.230.
[1] Luigi Barzini: The Italians (New York: Bantam Books, 1965), p.86.
Edward VII died in 1910. This means Castiglione's manual for surviving and staying sane was used continually by the elite classes for almost four hundred years. It might be profitable to study it.