Approximately two decades separate the ideation of the work form its publication. The oldest testimony of The Cortegiano, in fact, is in the form of a first signed draft, that can be dated around 1508-1513, and broadly contains, in a fragmentary manner, the wide ranging selection of topics later distributed in the four books of the tract. The future first and second book (dedicated to the institutio of the courtier) here take shape (with the notable exception constituted by the silence surrounding the question of language), while independently appear the so-called Lettera al Frisia in difesa delle donne and the parallel drafting of a speech de principe. This early dawn was followed, chronologically, by the three Vatican manuscripts: the Vat. lat. 8204, partial testimony of the first draft, that dates back to 1514-’15, and includes the part that corresponds to the first two books of the published edition and the prologue of the third; the Vat. lat. 8205, testimony of the entire first edition, produced between the end of 1515 and the following January, and then subjected, between 1518 and 1520, to interventions by the author and others who produced a second edition based on the first draft; the Vat. lat. 8206, the work of four scribes and corrected by the author, that includes the final configuration of the second edition of The Cortegiano, completed between 1520 and 1521. The fifth and final testimony is the manuscript Laur. Ashb. 409: which finished being copied on 23rd May in Rome, and the following year accompanied the author in Spain, where he continued to work on it until, in the spring of ’27, it was sent to Venice for publication.
Thus, in synthesis, the significant progress in the internal story of The Cortegiano took place between 1516 and 1518, in the domestic peace of his house in Mantua (after the stripping of the Duchy of Urbino by Leone X and Lorenzo de’ Medici, and after the agreements of Noyon concluded in August 1516, between Frances I and Charles V), and between 1522 and 1524 (starting with the election of Pope Hadrian VI, when the author was already part of the militia of the Church).
The genesis of the text
