| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

John E. Crowley. The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. Pp. xi, 361. $42.00.

This is a powerful book, full of startling information and valuable insights. 1

In the 1980s, social historians discovered Norbert Elias's newly translated The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (1978). Starting with sixteenth-century conduct books, Elias showed the tradition of refinement in Western culture for what it profoundly was: an intensifying policing of the boundaries of the body, a systematic masking or control of the orifices, and a social denial of the body's emissions. The timing for this revelation was right; the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s had included a revolt against the repression of the physical imposed by bourgeois politeness. Since that revelation, a great deal of very valuable work has been done on the many aspects of the civilizing process, including the late seventeenth-century beginning of the proliferation of equipment for advancing refinement that is known as the "consumer revolution." The greatest weakness of all this work, however, is that, being bounded within a process already under way, it shows in detail developments that appear in principle self-explanatory. Where else could this history be taking our civilization but toward the enhancement of refined comfort? . . .

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