ABSTRACT
Sometime in the late 1570s Gabriel Harvey wrote a cantankerous letter to Spenser complaining of changes in Cambridge scholarly tastes: ‘the French and Italian when so highlye regarded of Schollers? The Latine and Greeke, when so lightly?’ The animus of his complaint is reserved for aspirational Cambridge students who are abandoning ‘Xenophon and Plato’ for the courtesy books du jour: ‘Matchiauell a great man: Castilio of no small reputation … Galateo, and Guazzo neuer so happy.’1 At issue is not simply wounded national pride at yet another instance of Italian cultural superiority, but a disturbing shift in the humanist canon. While the courtesy writers Harvey mentioned had not made it onto the curricula of schools or universities, their popularity among students (and indeed scholars) allowed them to elbow their way onto the ground of supreme pedagogical authority traditionally held by stalwart humanist favourites such as Xenophon and Plato, and more recent pedagogical theorists such as Sir Thomas Elyot, Juan Luis Vives, Roger Ascham and Richard Mulcaster. This ground, from which advice genres such as mirrors-forprinces and schoolmasters’ theoretical writings issued and to which the humanist and Protestant poetics of Sidney and Spenser oriented themselves, was that which Spenser had made his own with the didactic poetics and Xenophontic cast of The Faerie Queene. With its alternative vision of social esteem and political obligation, the late sixteenth-century courtesy tradition, in both theory and practice, usurped the place and authority of didactic poetry.
