Publisher's Synopsis
Professor Woodhouse delivered his inaugural lecture on 25 October 1990 before the University of Oxford, in the presence of the President of Italy. His lecture discusses the changes in the social and political order in Italy following France's invasion of 1499. The resulting changes in mores were reflected in Castiglione's "Book of the Courtier", published in 1528. The rise of the lower classes meant that manners and customs gradually became devalued. Chesterfield's letters to his son (1744) came at the end of a series of courtesy manuals which delivered advice to courtiers in increasingly less scrupulous terms.
