Courtesy

Colin Clout's description of the gifts of the three Graces unfolds the virtue of courtesy as it is conceived by Spenser. The gifts range from an outer comeliness of manner and appearance to the skill of ‘Civility’, whose significance goes far beyond mere politeness: ‘This I call the civil life’, wrote the sixteenth-century writer, Thomas Starkey, ‘living togidder in good and politic order, one ever ready to do good to another, and as it were conspiring togidder in all virtue and honesty.’ Spenser's courtesy draws for its meaning on a number of related qualities: civility; humanity, as defined for example by Sir Thomas Elyot, who gives it three parts, benevolence, beneficence and liberality (The Governor p. 121); the arts of courtesy set out in such Italian ‘courtesy books’ as Castiglione's Il Libro del Cortegiano (1528), and courtesy as the word came to Spenser from its use in the Middle Ages with its ‘sense of individual integrity in relation to the group … of self-control and moderation, of active goodwill and kindness to others’.