ABSTRACT
This chapter delineates the spatio-temporal matrix within which the Spanish courtier came to represent a new ideal of Spanish masculine conduct. To unify the many into a conceptual whole and to instruct them in the ways of court comprised the ostensible raison detre of the literature of courtly conduct. But conduct literature also offers a glimpse into the contentious process of Spanish identity formation through which a new post-Medieval model of vassalage, the cortesano or courtier, was constructed and contested. As the first European monarchy to forge a worldwide empire in the sixteenth century, and the first to lose preeminence in the seventeenth, Spain, like an oldest child, grew up fast, without the benefit of older sibling's examples. Multiple challenges of governance the administration of far-flung territories, the transformation of Madrid into an international court, and the forging of a new national identity being just three have elicited an equally heterogeneous historiography.
