Book of the Courtier, social, display, performatively, rhetoric, shared, subjectivity, socially, dialogic

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rebuking their correspondents for deviating from moderation in perspective and behaviour or in those privileging a stoic attitude over the cynical outlook promoted by the poem answered. As in The Book of the Courtier these exchanges often display performatively the cohesion and integrity of social groups as they work towards positions of like-mindedness that revolve around the mean. They are frequently set pieces, whether written by separate authors, as in the case of the Henrician courtship exchanges examined in Chapter 5, or single authored, as in the pairs debating the preferability of married and single life in Chapter 3. Whilst these verses dramatise the management of socially harmonious relationships they are also concerned self-consciously with contemporary social philosophies which inform the ideologies of marriage, friendship, courtship and courtiership, and they provide benchmarks of decorum for the sorts of social interaction with which they are involved.

The mean represents a locus of assent or consensus that might be arrived at through collaborative reasoning, or a rhetoric of shared subjectivity. A recurring feature of socially dialogic verses is their display of intersubjectivity, what Jürgen Habermas describes as a form of communicative reasoning whereby interlocutors, through a process of negotiation, migrate towards, or demonstrate that they have already found, a ground of mutual understanding and an intellectual rapport, in this instance based upon moderation of speech and conduct. Habermas defines such processes as “the performative attitude of participants in interaction, who coordinate their plans for action by coming to an understanding about something in the world”. ²⁷² Such shared subjectivities, as seen in the Renaissance answer-poem, are highly affected in nature and cultivated to display the coherence and integrity of

²⁷² Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p.296.

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