ABSTRACT

A number of historians have demonstrated how the nobility in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries still saw their status not solely in terms of a birthright, but rather as a quality that needed constantly to be reaffirmed through virtuous actions. The prime category of identity for the ruling class as a social group in sixteenth-century Europe and on which they staked their claim to rule was their nobility. As Karen Neuschel succinctly puts it: The unique feature of the nobility as a political institution is the nobles claim to political power by virtue of their personal identity. His uniting factors of the nobility the distinct values, expectations and self regard emphasizing as they do the sense of an enclosed and self-valuating society, can be subsumed under the single concept of honour. This, as Giovanbattista Possevino says in one of the most influential sixteenth-century works of courtly science, Dialogo dello honore, pervades every element of life in this society.