Help with Renaissance Quote, please!

[cheriola]

I remember hearing a history professor once paraphrasing Baldassere Castiglione with the line "We must collect shards against the ruin of our civilisation." However, my google-fu is failing me as I try to find the actual quote. I think it was supposedly from "The Book of the Courtier". Though it might be that the quote was from somewhere else and

Comments

[twilight2000]

I don't know your subject matter particularly well, but see if this search helps you:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Baldassere+Castiglione+%2B+%22shards%22+%26+%22civilisation%22+quote&oq=Baldassere+Castiglione+%2B+%22shards%22+%26+%22civilisation%22+quote&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=serp.12...6426.7775.0.9265.2.2.0.0.0.0.247.411.0j1j1.2.0...0.0.EYyQHY06LAA

[tersa]

I'm no expert and have no familiarity with the source, but googling that phrase turned up a link to a write-up by professor Peter Saccio that includes something roughly akin to what you said in his summary of The Book of the Courtier:

"The shards of learning and civilization maintained by Italians are the source of hope for better times; the barbarians might take their freedom, property, even their lives, but their high culture will be sustained as long as individual men and women strive to reach the perfect, the ideal, or the divine."

which would seem to suggest it is a paraphrase (and maybe even of that professor?) rather than a direct quote.

The wikipedia article on The Book of the Courtier includes several versions of English translations of the book available; it's crude, but none of them use the word 'shard' in their translations.

[steepholm]

I wonder if your professor was somehow conflating Castiglione with that line from "The Waste Land": "These fragments I have shored against my ruins"?

[cheriola]

Yes, I think that's it. Thanks!

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