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

What counted as good and bad manners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Anna Bryson explores what is often entertaining evidence for Tudor and Stuart ideas of bodily decency and decorum, table manners and polite conversation, and also shows the crucial importance of the values of 'courtesy' and 'civility' in an aristocratic society.
In any society, a foreigner learning the language must also learn what passes for good manners. The same is true for the historian trying to understand the social rules of a period and why these change. This book explores the nature and development of early modern conceptions of good manners, and examines some of the particular forms of everyday behaviour which these conceptions implied. Courtesy' andCivility' were among the values central to Tudor and Stuart
assumptions and fears about the social and political order.