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The metamorphosis of the knight into a courtier or gentleman is a problem central to medi- eval and renaissance ideas.It touches upon changing social behaviour; economic, political, and diplomatic history; literature and court festivals; heraldic institutions; the art of war; and evolving ideals of education.The subject is European in scope, although Miss Bornstein concentrates upon English sources which, she says, have not been studied.She may have written this before the appearance of Claus Uhlig's fully documented Hofkritik im England: though she does, in fact, cite other books published in 1973 and after.Her volume is meagre -just over 30,000 words-and unequal to the magnitude of her theme.The book purports to deal with courtesy literature written, or translated, in England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.However, sinceas the author acknowledges -much of this material is international, she has to discuss writers such as Christine de Pisan and Castiglione, though without setting them within the contexts of French and Italian society, or of changing English attitudes towards Continental cultures.Guazzo, for example, is mentioned without reference either to the purpose of his work in relation to that of Castiglione, or to his reception in England.Neither Lievsay's study of Guazzo, nor Javitch's critique, is used.Edward IV's Black Book may have been compiled through a "desire to vie with Burgundian standards of opulence" (p.64), but we learn nothing about those standards or about Olivier de la Marche's account of the household of Charles the Bold.No attempt is made to show how different courts functioned at different times, although such material is not uncharted; and, specifically on England, Gervase Mathew's Court of Richard II provides a sensitive treatment of medieval ideas.Miss Bornstein explains that, because many of the relevant texts "remain in manuscript or in early printed editions," she has "provided summaries as well as substantial extracts" from them.In fact the only manuscripts cited are those which provide the illustrations; and these citations are merely descriptive.Nothing is said of the relationship between Lans- downe MS. 285, Pierpont Morgan MS.775, and the surviving manuscript corpus of her- | aldic commonplace books, which is crucial for the history of chivalric ideas.
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