In Pursuit of Civility Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England Keith Thomas Tai Lieu Chat Luong in pursuit of Civility 12 t h e m e nah e m st e r n j eru s al em L e ct u r e s Brandeis University Press Historical Society of Israel 1 Keith thomas 2 In Pursuit of Civility ․․․․․․․ manners and Civilization in early modern england ․․․․․․․ Brandeis University Press Waltham, Massachusetts 12 historical society of israel / brandeis university press An imprint of University Press of New England www.com © 2018 Keith Thomas All rights reserved For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.com The excerpt from Richard Wilbur’s translation of Molière’s The Misanthrope is reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing. Scott’s poem “Degeneration” is reprinted by permission of William Toye, literary executor for the estate of F. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request Hardcover isbn: 978-1-5126-0280-7 Paperback isbn: 978-1-5126-0281-4 Ebook isbn: 978-1-5126-0282-1 1 to 2 j oh n, r i c ha r d, a nd ma de l ine Contents ․․․․․․․ Foreword by David Katz ix Preface xiii Introduction 1 1 1 2 civil behavior 11 The Chronology of Manners 11 Manners and Gentility 23 Refinement 37 1 2 2 manners and the social order 49 The Social Hierarchy 49 The Topography of Manners 57 The Civility of the Middling Sort 62 The Manners of the People 65 Civilizing Agents 70 Plebeian Civility 74 1 3 2 the civilized condition 86 Civil Society 86 Civilized Warfare 104 A Civilized Compassion 110 Civilized Manners 121 The Fruits of Civility 127 1 4 2 the progress of civilization 134 The Ascent to Civility 134 Barbarous Neighbours 153 1 5 2 exporting civility 159 Confronting the Barbarians 159 Civilizing by Force 163 Inventing Race 173 Fighting and Enslaving 176 1 6 2 civilization reconsidered 183 Cultural Relativism 183 Another Kind of Civility 188 The Civilizing Mission Disputed 198 The Defects of Civilization 206 Civilization Rejected 210 1 7 2 changing modes of civility 219 Xenophobic Masculinity 219 Manners and Morality 223 The Quaker Challenge 230 Democratic Civility 235 The Future of Manners 247 Note on References 257 Abbreviations 259 Notes 261 Index 349 Foreword David S. Katz ․․․․․․․ The great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt prefaced his study of the civi- lization of the Renaissance in Italy by remarking that to “each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a given civilization present a different picture.” The historical sources are a “wide ocean,” and in fact “the same studies which have served for this work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead also to essentially different conclusions.” Burckhardt wrote these words, derived from his personal experience at the coal face of historical research in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time when the field was becoming professionalized in the Age of Ranke.
Historiograph- ical theory eventually caught up with what Burckhardt already knew. In the 1930s we were informed that it is the job of historians to recognize patterns in the stream of past events. Fifty years later it was revealed that there is no his- tory “out there” waiting to be transferred to the printed page. It is the historian who chooses the subject and paints a coherent picture from the material he or she selects.
This is why Burckhardt wrote that his bulky book was merely “an essay in the strictest sense of the word.” For over half a century, Keith Thomas has sailed that “wide ocean” of early modern English historical sources, alighting on scholarly islands of his own creation: religion and the decline of magic, man and the natural world, the ends of life, and now the concept of civility, not to mention smaller but im- portant islets along the way. His working technique is no secret, observable not only to regular denizens of the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, but also to readers of the London Review of Books, where in a fascinating article published in 2010 he revealed how he does it (“Diary,” London Review of Books, 10 June, 2010). Keith Thomas developed a unique system, which begins with note taking, then cutting up the gobbets into strips that are crammed into envelopes bearing subject titles and are finally stapled onto pieces of paper that are stacked in a particular order, and this all before he begins to write. The technology is old-school, and as Thomas himself com- ments sardonically, most of what takes him days to do can now be done by searching a database for a key word.
But all that depends on knowing upon which wide ocean to sail. As Ranke himself insisted, after the documents have been collected, “intuition is re- quired.” Keith Thomas never accepted the dubious claim that fine writing is literature and the rest is mere historical raw material ready for mining and production. The sort of historical anthropology that he practices involves casting the broadest possible net into that wide ocean, in an attempt to read everything published between about 1530 and 1770. In this he is like his prede- cessor Christopher Hill, who introduced the method of massive “far-reading” and made the English Civil War one of the most attractive fields of research for scholars coming of age in the late sixties and early seventies.
It is very hard for us today to convey the excitement generated by the pub- lication in 1971 of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. It was his first book and he was nearly forty years old, but it was the product of a long gestation. In those halcyon days, young scholars were not hounded into premature publication of countable articles or pressured into applying for unneeded outside grants. Anthropology was all the rage then, and histori- ans were keen to apply to their work the insights of people like Claude Lévi- S trauss, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz.
The supernatural shadow cast by conventional religion was understood, and the European witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was already a subject for discussion. But Keith Thomas’s book put it all together, not only witchcraft in its distinctive English form, but also the place of magic— “the bastard sister of science,” as Frazer called it— and the entire range of occult popular and elite thought in a land where the gradual adoption of Protestantism left believers helpless before the forces of evil, abandoned by the comforting saints and rituals of the Roman Catholic tradition. The phenomenon of witchcraft and popular culture in general became academic growth industries after the publication of Keith Thomas’s massive book, which helped establish the historical study of early modern England as perhaps the most exciting field in English history for many years. In Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800, published in 1983, Keith Thomas argued that there was a major shift in En- glish attitudes toward nature in the early modern period.
In the early sixteenth century, people assumed that nature existed in order to serve humankind. Three centuries later, a new stance had emerged, exemplified, for example, by efforts to preserve the countryside, and to prevent cruelty to animals. Thomas shows his hand without hesitation, proclaiming that the book is “intended to do something to reunite the studies of history and of literature in the way G. Trevelyan continually urged.” Again, it is the sheer range of sources that is so astonishing, the product of years of self-directed reading.
Keith Thomas gave the Ford Lectures in 2000 and expanded them as The Ends of Life: Roads x foreword to Fulfilment in Early Modern England, published by Oxford University Press nine years later. His subject is a prime example of one created by wide reading until a pattern emerges, based on the insight that although naturally everyone hoped to find a place in the world to come, in practice people also wanted to make something of their time on earth. Thomas looks at six roads to fulfill- ment in early modern England: military prowess, work, wealth, reputation, personal relationships, and the afterlife. Everything Keith Thomas writes inspires admiration, and so too this pres- ent book on the concept of civility, which is written in his signature serene style and supported by an array of footnotes, an art form that is the secret love of professional historians.
“I have tried to identify just what it was that the people of early modern England regarded as distinctive and superior about their way of living,” Thomas explains, “in other words, what they thought it meant to be ‘civilized.’” Others have written about civility, but the application of Thomas’s method of blanket reading gives it much greater depth, and in itself has provided a rich mine of source materials. Burckhardt, in the middle of his great book, suddenly confesses to a crisis of confidence. “No one is more conscious than the author of the defects in his knowledge,” he admits. “Of the multitude of special works in which the sub- ject is adequately treated, even the names are but imperfectly known to him.” With a characteristic modesty that resembles Burckhardt’s, Keith Thomas once explained his aim: “to immerse myself in the past until I know it well enough for my judgment of what is or is not representative to seem acceptable without undue epistemological debate.” A reviewer of one of Keith Thomas’s books complained about his writing history “with the telling anecdote, the apt witticism, and the evocative metaphor conveying the wide learning and cultural urbanity of the author, while the reader is entertained and simulta- neously informed about a whole society.” As with the Old Testament story of Balaam, what was intended as a curse can only be seen as a blessing.
foreword xi Preface ․․․․․․․ This book is a revised and much-expanded version of three Menahem Stern lectures given in Jerusalem in November 2003. I thank the Israel Historical Society for inviting me to deliver them; and I am very grateful to my hosts, particularly the late Michael Heyd, the late Elliott Horowitz, and Yosef Kap lan, for their kindness and hospitality. I also thank my alert and critical audi- ence for listening so attentively and for offering many helpful comments in the ensuing discussions. I am particularly grateful to Maayan Avineri-Rebhun for the exceptional patience with which she has waited for the deplorably late delivery of my manuscript.
Warm thanks are also due to my two publishers, Richard Pult of the Uni- versity Press of New England and Heather McCallum of Yale University Press, for their brisk efficiency and generous encouragement. I owe my intro- duction to Yale to the kindness of Ivon Asquith and Richard Fisher. When I was invited, it was suggested that I might speak about manners in early modern England. I was happy to do so, for this enabled me to return to themes that I had discussed in previous lectures and seminars at British, North American, Japanese, and Australian universities.
It is a tricky topic, however, for the word “manners” has several different meanings. Today it is most commonly used as a term for polite social behavior. This is what the elderly have in mind when they say of some young people that they have very good manners, of others that they have very bad manners, and of some that they have no manners at all. The history of manners in this sense of the word was once regarded as a rather trivial subject, but in recent years it has come to be recognized as one of considerable social and moral importance, fundamen- tal, indeed, to understanding the way in which people think of themselves and their relationship to each other.