From Courtesy to Civility Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England [Hardcover]

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.

Anna Bryson makes an important contribution in this intelligent and careful study of manners in early modern England....[A]n important and useful book.... --Journal of Social History

[Bryson's] extensive quotations and explanatory frame provide an excellent introduction to the forms and formulas of change, particularly highlighting seventeenth-century urbanization, administrative growth, reconceptualization of sovereignty, and heightened social hierarchy...This is a fine magnification of the early modern English case in the European history of manners. --Albion