6 ms·

Manners in Early Modern England

80 points by pulisse 8y ago

lainga 8y ago
This is off-topic, but I just wanted to highlight the following sentence: [Thomas] reads everything. Not just the latest scholarship across innumerable topics, but also theorists – whether Marx and Engels, Gramsci or Bourdieu. Zounds! Don't tell me he reads Lenin and Kropotkin as well!
- jotm 8y ago
  What's wrong with that?
  - btilly 8y ago
    All four named authors were communists. In attempting to demonstrate diversity, they accidentally demonstrated the opposite. It would be like bragging about the diversity of people that you listen to today, and then listing Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson. Yes, that's a lot of work by a bunch of different people, but you're not really getting exposed to the full range of thought in our culture.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      It also doesn't fit in with even 'covering the high novelty/obscure ones' like if he listed say Georgists, and Mercantalists, and Cameralists.
  - lainga 8y ago
    Well, it's not exactly everything, is it?
  - bitwize 8y ago
    He has wide, eclectic musical tastes too -- country and western.
  - mturmon 8y ago
    “Everything from A to C.” More seriously, reading these writers is really basic stuff for any humanities graduate curriculum...and the book under review is authored by a well-known Oxford don.
    - paganel 8y ago
      For what it’s worth not a lot of Marxists themselves have read Marx, and a guy like Gramsci wasn’t that popular outside of Italy and a few select circles until not that long ago. It baffles me though why people still spend time reading Bourdieu, he reminds me of “champagne socialism”.
      - foozed 8y ago
        I wasn't aware of the term "champagne socialism", thanks for sharing that.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  While we're off-topic, I need to look this tidbit a little bit more: > Romans had not been truly civilised – because they didn’t know about gloves
- gadders 8y ago
  Well, it is the Guardian. You don't read it expecting balance.
- chrisdevereux 8y ago
  Well yeah, it's unusual enough to be worth mentioning that a historian is interested in social theory. As an example of the stuff they read that you might not expect.
zone411 8y ago
I'd also recommend "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century" by Ian Mortimer.
modells 8y ago
My hypothesis on manners is that the strictness of norms are proportional to hierarchicalness, and permissibility and propensity to violence.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  That seems to map very well to feudalism and well blood feud cultures as well. There was an interesting thing that happened in both Japanese and English linguistically - both had 'ultrapolite' linguistic elements that were discarded because they wound up used only mockingly/ironically when it went from polite to refer to your superior using thee/thou as opposed to rude. Thee/thou was transitioning to rude in Shakespeare's time and while Japanese still has many formal pronouns the most extreme were reserved for historical fiction, mockery, and the massively arrogant.
  - vostok 8y ago
    > when it went from polite to refer to your superior using thee/thou as opposed to rude That's fascinating. In my native language you would have been considered more polite and thou would be for friends or equals.
    - tdumitrescu 8y ago
      That is indeed how it was. "thou" was the familiar form in contrast to "you" which was the formal form (see for instance the discussion at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou). Modern English speakers typically hear "thou" as more formal because it only persists in Biblical and similar archaic usages.
      - eecc 8y ago
        The use of “thou” in the English translation of the Bible was made deliberately to “lessen the gap” with the divinity (as opposed to the incomprehensible Latin used by the Catholics.) Funny how that got lost and it’s now perceived as old-fashioned submissiveness.
mercer 8y ago
@dang: Any chance the url could be changed to the non-amp version?
gadders 8y ago
"Yet norms of civility also had another, more positive function. In an age in which religious, cultural and political passions were even more extreme than in our own, they enabled people to overcome deeply rooted and potentially dangerous differences, to live harmoniously side by side, and to discourse with one another without rancour, violence or abuse. Ultimately for Thomas this is their more important and enduring purpose, as “restraint, tolerance and mutual understanding” are the necessary preconditions for humans to coexist and flourish." Yeah, we could do with more of this.
woodandsteel 8y ago
All those people who think we should go back to some earlier form of Western culture try to make the manners back then look far better than they actually were.

80 points by pulisse 8y ago

This is off-topic, but I just wanted to highlight the following sentence: [Thomas] reads everything. Not just the latest scholarship across innumerable topics, but also theorists – whether Marx and Engels, Gramsci or Bourdieu. Zounds! Don't tell me he reads Lenin and Kropotkin as well!

jotm 8y ago
What's wrong with that?
- btilly 8y ago
  All four named authors were communists. In attempting to demonstrate diversity, they accidentally demonstrated the opposite. It would be like bragging about the diversity of people that you listen to today, and then listing Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson. Yes, that's a lot of work by a bunch of different people, but you're not really getting exposed to the full range of thought in our culture.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    It also doesn't fit in with even 'covering the high novelty/obscure ones' like if he listed say Georgists, and Mercantalists, and Cameralists.
- lainga 8y ago
  Well, it's not exactly everything, is it?
- bitwize 8y ago
  He has wide, eclectic musical tastes too -- country and western.
- mturmon 8y ago
  “Everything from A to C.” More seriously, reading these writers is really basic stuff for any humanities graduate curriculum...and the book under review is authored by a well-known Oxford don.
  - paganel 8y ago
    For what it’s worth not a lot of Marxists themselves have read Marx, and a guy like Gramsci wasn’t that popular outside of Italy and a few select circles until not that long ago. It baffles me though why people still spend time reading Bourdieu, he reminds me of “champagne socialism”.
    - foozed 8y ago
      I wasn't aware of the term "champagne socialism", thanks for sharing that.
oh_sigh 8y ago
While we're off-topic, I need to look this tidbit a little bit more: > Romans had not been truly civilised – because they didn’t know about gloves
gadders 8y ago
Well, it is the Guardian. You don't read it expecting balance.
chrisdevereux 8y ago
Well yeah, it's unusual enough to be worth mentioning that a historian is interested in social theory. As an example of the stuff they read that you might not expect.

zone411 8y ago

I'd also recommend "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century" by Ian Mortimer.

modells 8y ago

My hypothesis on manners is that the strictness of norms are proportional to hierarchicalness, and permissibility and propensity to violence.

Nasrudith 8y ago
That seems to map very well to feudalism and well blood feud cultures as well. There was an interesting thing that happened in both Japanese and English linguistically - both had 'ultrapolite' linguistic elements that were discarded because they wound up used only mockingly/ironically when it went from polite to refer to your superior using thee/thou as opposed to rude. Thee/thou was transitioning to rude in Shakespeare's time and while Japanese still has many formal pronouns the most extreme were reserved for historical fiction, mockery, and the massively arrogant.
- vostok 8y ago
  > when it went from polite to refer to your superior using thee/thou as opposed to rude That's fascinating. In my native language you would have been considered more polite and thou would be for friends or equals.
  - tdumitrescu 8y ago
    That is indeed how it was. "thou" was the familiar form in contrast to "you" which was the formal form (see for instance the discussion at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou). Modern English speakers typically hear "thou" as more formal because it only persists in Biblical and similar archaic usages.
    - eecc 8y ago
      The use of “thou” in the English translation of the Bible was made deliberately to “lessen the gap” with the divinity (as opposed to the incomprehensible Latin used by the Catholics.) Funny how that got lost and it’s now perceived as old-fashioned submissiveness.

mercer 8y ago

@dang: Any chance the url could be changed to the non-amp version?

gadders 8y ago

"Yet norms of civility also had another, more positive function. In an age in which religious, cultural and political passions were even more extreme than in our own, they enabled people to overcome deeply rooted and potentially dangerous differences, to live harmoniously side by side, and to discourse with one another without rancour, violence or abuse. Ultimately for Thomas this is their more important and enduring purpose, as “restraint, tolerance and mutual understanding” are the necessary preconditions for humans to coexist and flourish." Yeah, we could do with more of this.

woodandsteel 8y ago

All those people who think we should go back to some earlier form of Western culture try to make the manners back then look far better than they actually were.