When I agreed to review this book, I overlooked the quotation marks in the volume's title. They matter. The “art of nobility” refers to the aristocracy in early modern Europe whose claims to distinction resided, among other things, in linguistic choices, bodily movements, behavioral modes, and the like. Importantly, the titular concept, as the editors Claudius Sittig and Christian Wieland have it in their introduction, is double-edged: the title conjures up the arts by and for nobles. The fifteen wide-ranging contributions in this volume explore the nexus of aristocratic self-presentation and aesthetic representation in early modern Europe. Of all the arts, dance may best exemplify such a focus. Yet as Ivana Rentsch points out, the appeal of this aristocratic mode of expression resulted in a technical finesse whose demands were such that dancers performed artful negligence at times. The volume's eminently productive themes thus bring to the fore that the aristocratic community flourished in in-betweens that cannot be transposed into general codes, etiquettes, or decorum.

Since the European aristocracy was riven by distinctions of rank, who belonged and in what way remained a question. In addition, being an aristocrat meant something particular in different locations, as Arne Karsten demonstrates regarding the city of Rome. There, the papacy's electoral makeup created ample opportunities for nobles in search of advancement. As a consequence, a rich memorial landscape of funerary and other monuments emerged in the Holy City. Martin Wrede reveals that Philip II, often described as a quintessential Spaniard, legitimated his rule through performing Burgundianness in the tradition of his ancestors. On the backdrop of middle-class utilitarianism, the nobility could bill itself as a class dedicated to beauty (Angelika Linke). That “music is of utility to everyone and harm to no one,” as Richard Pace wrote in 1517 (251), may have been a widely held opinion among sixteenth-century pedagogical reformers. Yet English authors of court manuals praised music as a pleasant pastime, not as a school of virtue—a Protestant vision whose openness would provide the foundation for the efflorescence of musicmaking in late Renaissance England—as Dietrich Helms emphasizes. If one of their goals was to defy what was billed as common, nobles were forced to reinvent their ways over time. Ronald Asch aptly contextualizes the libertines’ sophisticated breach of conduct in the milieu of Restoration England. In other words, aristocrats embraced humorous distancing, prevaricating, defying, and similar practices.

While anti-aristocratic topoi ridiculed nobles as ignoramuses on the one hand and aristocratic self-fashioning highlighted anti-academic attitudes on the other hand, Christian Wieland argues that aristocrats in fact actively participated in the upswing of universities in the Holy Roman Empire from the fifteenth century onward. Readers, patrons, and authors, literati of noble descent were agents in the nascent literary sphere in the vernacular. Still, as writers, they often equivocated on their authorship or refrained from publishing the works they had penned (Claudius Sittig). The fact that the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (1617–80) was an association of aristocrats as well as non-aristocrats has long obfuscated its efforts to ennoble the German language (Andreas Herz). With great insight, Volkhard Wels contends that Martin Opitz's poetics of 1624 was predicated on ideas of speech and writing in German common among the nobility. Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy, the memoirist banned from Versailles, embraced ambivalence as a mode of expression in his artistic choices and commissions in the arts, affirming his independence as a noble while simultaneously stressing his place in the French aristocracy, as Edoardo Costatura demonstrates.

Ultimately, these contributions free the various arts from the bondage of historical approaches that reduce nobles’ passion for and participation in the arts to self-representational grandeur. Accordingly, Matthias Müller posits that early collectors like Frederick the Wise of Saxony provided artists with creative freedoms in the manner of Italian courts of his time. Suffice it to say, this splendid anthology comes highly recommended for anyone interested in early modern European history and culture, the study of the aristocracy, and the history of literature, the visual arts, music, and dance.