In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England

The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures

by Keith Thomas

Keith Thomas’s earlier studies in the ethnography of early modern England, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Man and the Natural World, and The Ends of Life, were all attempts to explore beliefs, values, and social practices in the centuries from 1500 to 1800. In Pursuit of Civility continues this quest by examining what English people thought it meant to be “civilized” and how that condition differed from being “barbarous” or “savage.” Thomas shows that the upper ranks of society sought to distinguish themselves from their social inferiors by distinctive ways of moving, speaking, and comporting themselves, and that the common people developed their own form of civility. The belief of the English in their superior civility shaped their relations with the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish, and was fundamental to their dealings with the native peoples of North America, India, and Australia. Yet not everyone shared this belief in the superiority of Western civilization; the book sheds light on the origins of both anticolonialism and cultural relativism. Thomas has written an accessible history based on wide reading, abounding in fresh insights, and illustrated by many striking quotations and anecdotes from contemporary sources.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, 17th Century, 18th Century, 16th Century, Anthropology

424 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Sir Keith Thomas was born in 1933 and educated at Barry County Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. He has spent all his academic career in Oxford, as a senior scholar of St. Antony's (1955), a Prize Fellow of All Souls (1955-57), Fellow and Tutor of St John's (1957-85), Reader (1978-85), ad hominem Professor (1986) and President of Corpus Christi (1986-2000). He returned to All Souls as a Distinguished Fellow (2001-15). He is now an Honorary Fellow of All Souls, Balliol, Corpus Christi and St John's. Elected FBA in 1979, he was President of the British Academy (1993-97). He is a member of the Academia Europaea, a Founding Member of the Learned Society of Wales, a Foreign Hon. Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Hon. Member of the Japan Academy. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton, Stanford, Columbia and Louisiana State Universities. He has published essays on many different aspects of the social and cultural history of early modern England.

Reviews

[kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

love history books chock full with nifty and charming anecdotes which capture the strangeness of the past. the general argument is not necessarily the most revolutionary or eye-opening.

[stephanie suh · Rating 5 out of 5]

We live in an age of casual manners that would alarm the folks who still remember when letters and rotary telephones were the prime means of communication, not to speak of those in days of yore. But the leniency of manners is not a thing of our age, but it has been constant of every age, as a note faintly scribbled on a tablet discovered in an ancient Roman archeological site reveals, “Today’s kids are rude imps.” Which also brings us to the ensuing questions of what defines civility. Does civility equate submissiveness with anachronistic fogyism and therefore must be overruled with unrelenting individualism? Thomas Thomas’s In pursuit of civility delves into the history of civility in England in an attempt to reach the subjectivity of civility as a universal social cohesion to live harmoniously as citizens of the world.

Civility is a tacitly agreed social duty, a state of refinement equivalent to one’s moral character that subsumes civilization in its widest sense, opposite barbarism, a primordial state of beastliness dispossessed of all things antonymous with humanity. Originally derived from the Greek word, “barbarous,” meaning a person whose speech was incomprehensible, a dichotomy between the civilized and the barbarian has retained its rhetorical utility throughout the centuries: Civility is of good manner and good citizenship, whereas barbarianism denotes vulgarity, ignorance, and violence. Thomas discourses that civility as the crucial index of a country’s social harmony and political stability has set a template for a leviathan module of defining civilization, the end product of cultural, moral, and material condition of the civilizing process. That is, where civility reigns, there is civilization and therefore humanity. For civility sprang from a necessity of communal life rather than from an abstract ideology to subjugate the unseemly at the low rungs of the social ladder. Surely, the aristocrats refined a distinctive code of manners as the merit of the elites to distinguish themselves from the melee, but in a wider picture of a society, civility was a must to make all lives easier to live as they, especially the middle class and the working class, strove to progress by being interdependent of each other for economic gains. Thomas points out that intensive labor raised people above rude and sordid barbarism and begets arts by which human life is civilized because productive, labor-driven industry is the bedrock of civility from which economic, artistic, and intellectual benefits ensued.

Thomas unpicks that nowadays politeness is synonymous with effeminateness, acquiescence, servility, foppishness, kowtowing, even as opposed to the fierce “equality to all.” Politeness is politically and socially and liberally misconstrued as weakness of character or diffidence of self-esteem or exotic cultural custom. People are misidentify politeness, a set of good behaviors out of “sweetness of the mind” as servility because they are foolishly led to a belief that politeness is an anachronistically incoherent legacy of the racist conservative history of the past that they must thwart with full force and effect. However, Thomas benevolently keeps us in a positive light in this vacuum of civility by saying that what we have these days is “a new and more equal form of civility,” which shows that we as a collective human enterprise is not retrogressing but progressing toward the better future if we understand that civility is as important in an egalitarian society as in a hierarchical one by learning to disagree without being disagreeable. All in all, this is a highly informative read accessible to the general reader who regards politeness as sweetness of the mind and who extends it to all humankind as a citizen of the world.

[Siobhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is best read and digested as a compilation that puts together a series of lectures as opposed to being digested as one mighty tome. After each section has come to an end, there is much to reflect on. It provides a whole new dimension to the preconceived notions and norms that have been built up in everyday ettiquette in the name of civilty. Mo Molam was once asked why it was challenging to build relationships across communities in Northern Ireland. The answer was not as anticipated! It directly addressed how 'civility', 'decorum' and 'outrage' were used to coerce, control, ridicule, minimise and invalidate. This book provides an uncomfortable insight into the historical and residual British psyche that still plays out today.

In a time were many are charged with 'a lack of civility' and 'cancelled' as opposed to seeking common ground and reflecting on genuine constructive criticism ... its a worthy disquisition to dip in and out it.

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thomas' Man and the natural world was (is) a wonderful, wonderful book, so I expected great things from this one.
But I think there's a problem of structure: the mass of material is so enormous, and the size of Thomas' learning so great, that he seems to be struggling to keep things apart, while having distinct chapters organised around different themes.
So it comes to read as an accumulation of anecdotes, references, extracts, the unity of which becomes hazier as you progress simply because, everything being related, it feels like repetition.
And the main argument also gets lost a bit: too much material, too detailed...too messy despite the impressive work, scholarship and organisation.
Some nuggets in there of course, but yeah...not quite it.

[Mark Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

This history of manners, written in 2018, looks at social attitudes to 'civility' (and its opposite relation - 'barbarism') that came to the fore in the eighteenth century.

Towards the end of the book Thomas says that the usage of these terms by the literate classes of the time was often 'rhetorical'. It helped them to reinforce its own world-view by defining 'civility' against it saw as 'barbarous' (different cultures, different classes,different ethnicities - "savages", different  freedoms and religions etc).

Decorum and deportment, for example,were seen as essential virtues by an aristocratic class that since the decline of the medieval chivalric code had distanced itself from the messy business of fighting war, and was instead keen to justify military and settler violence in ethical terms.

It was seen as acceptable for invaders to seize and colonize uncultivated land, inhabited only by savages. By "civilizing savages" in Virginia in 1606, the invaders could eventually trade with them, and could “make them tractable and subject to authority “(Thomas,p. 224).

Thomas also tracks the inconsistencies in this world view,as England became what he terms an “aristocratic republic” ( p.328) after the breakdown in “normal courtesies”, 1640-1642. Quakers challenged the “laws of civility” by addressing everyone with the familar “thou” (p.311) in the name of religious principle,and by refusing to kneel or courtesy.

The “conventional rituals of deference” (p.323) were restored with the reign of Charles II, but  already “thou” was being replaced by “you” as a form of address (p.323), paving the way both for more informal language, and for expressions of political dissent.

Keith Thomas's method is magisterial -  in his gathering of quotations from primary sources, - but it can be overwhelming.
Sometimes there is a sense that the presentation of one quotation after another masks what Thomas is saying - but his message is clear in the closing lines:

“Civility called for restraint, tolerance and mutual understanding. Barbarism was the opposite: it meant disorder, cruelty and ignorance. The contrast between the two conditions has not lost its meaning.” (p.346).




 



 

[Adrian]

As the subtitle suggests Thomas covers both the evolution of manners and the larger meaning of civilization that is arts, science and learning. The period covered is 16th-17th century England. Thomas scorns the idea that an interest in civility rose up from nothing at this time- the medieval period had a lively interest in decorum but it was the publishing of many books and treatises on the subject in the 16th century that makes it appear new to this time. It's clear that an increase in social civility was used to mark and differentiate the classes. In time most of the pleasantries and verbal tics that marked social interaction were lost as society became more democratic. Perhaps the civilization chapters are more interesting. It's a truism that all people think they are more civilized than their neighbours and the farther they live away the more barbarous they are. The British were just as convinced of this as anyone. Yet they hanged more people during this period than any of their European neighbours. Between 1580 and 1630 they hanged more people than in any other 50 year span in their history. It's encouraging to realize that there were people in the 16th century who recognized that comparison of different cultures was entirely subjective. When England began to export civilization (Ireland, Scotland, North America) and forcing people to live as they do they created an historical problem we are still dealing with today. Thomas is an accomplished and gifted historian but the book is so over referenced with contemporary sources saying the same thing that this was not an easy book to read. It took me two weeks to read a book which is only 255 pages long.

[Susie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Mixed feelings towards this book. Some chapters were so full of quotes that they became quite tedious. I definitely preferred religion and the decline of magic in this regard. I feel like the authors argument was getting lost in overloaded quotations.

But I have learned a lot about civility and will be using this as a source in my dissertation that explores civility in relation to deafness.

I did feel like there was one over-generalisation in regards to all revolutionary actors being against civility, which is not true, as I have seen in my recent research on the French and Haitian revolutions.

I do recommend reading this. I found it interesting to think that in todays world, bluntness is now seen as a medically disordered.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Manners maketh the man. Or, how white western Europe thought they were the only civilised nations in the world. Interesting look at attitudes towards manners and behaviour in the early modern period.

[Blake Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sir Keith Thomas does it again!