Bringing some aspects of rhetoric tradition back into the sociological view of court societies, this article analyses the narrative structure of a classic book of court societies - The Book of The Courtier - to sustain dissimulation as a component of both renaissance self-fashioning and sociability. Since the Norbert Elias' classical analysis this kind of books has received a lot of attention from sociological criticism. However, dissimulation is usually related to hidden interests, but rarely to an aesthetic and moral judgement about social action, which is the perspective of this paper.
Renaissance sociability; Identity; Dissimulation; Baldassare Castiglione