From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (review)

Anna Bryson makes an important contribution in this intelligent and careful study of manners in early modern England. At once social, cultural, and political history, From Courtesy to Civility tells the story of how the English aristocracy adapted to new political conditions by adopting the Italian code of civility. In so doing, it helps to us to witness the transformation of medieval lords who practiced a courtesy based on notions of service, into the less politically independent but still powerful nobility distinguished by civil behavior in the court and capital of the seventeenth century. At the center of Bryson’s study is an analysis of the conduct literature in circulation in early modern England. What truly distinguishes her work is the way she embeds this literature in its contemporary context. The results are complex but compelling. In addition to helping us understand the evolution of aristocratic culture, then, Bryson’s painstaking analysis makes a big stride in the history of manners.

Bryson’s contributions are quickly apparent for she situates her study early on in its theoretical and historiographic context. Her introduction also provides a good description of conduct literature, thereby updating the standard reference work in this area, John Mason’s Gentlefolk in the Making (1935). In her second chapter Bryson performs the useful service of describing the evolution of the concept of civility. She then turns to the specific rules for behavior in the relevant treatises, and achieves the signal feat of gently but firmly showing how Norbert Elias’s “rising levels of squeamishness” argument greatly oversimplifies the picture. Like every other student of manners, Bryson acknowledges Elias’s pioneering work, but she also shows how the relationship of specific rules to reality is far more complicated than he acknowledged. She prefers to see manners as the literal embodiment of aristocratic culture, a way of acting aristocratic status in everyday life. Bryson drives this lesson home in subsequent chapters where she situates English adoption of Italian courtesy literature in the real context of an evolving court and the growth of London as an important center of aristocratic life. She refines this picture further with an examination of specific conventions which grew around the use of language.

While Bryson largely drops direct discussion of Elias in her final chapters, they are where her alternate vision of manners as tools for expressing social status becomes most clear. They also protect her some from the usual pitfall of the study of manners: the skepticism as to whether the discussion of behavior in conduct literature bore any clear relation to “real life.” Bryson actually fends off such criticism earlier, by noting that what matters in conduct books are not specific rules (they do not actually change that much), but the shifting ideals, values, or “image” of proper behavior that the changing patterns of organization and emphasis of those rules represent. In her final chapters Bryson gains further credibility by readily admitting that civility was not embraced by all, not even all aristocrats. First, she both secures her earlier discussion of the adoption of civility by analyzing contemporary worries about it, especially about its seeming equanimity concerning “artful” behavior. In a penultimate chapter she goes one step further, and convincingly argues that the libertine culture of the Restoration period was a conscious rejection of civility. These points are not retreats or qualifications of her earlier delineation of aristocratic embrace of civility, rather, they prove her point by showing contemporary reaction to this development. In libertine culture, she has even found an analogous system. For Restoration libertines, like late Tudor and early Stuart civil gentlemen, were trying to set themselves off from others through their behavior. The outrageous acts of the former thus demonstrate both the hold of civil culture (by erecting a counterculture) and its social functions (the expression of status). By this point the reader wonders how we could have been content with Elias’s story of manners...