Reviews of Books

Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860. By C. Dallett Hemphill. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. $35.00.)

The well-mannered man, according to The Courte of Civill Courtesie (1582), "if he be constrained to yawne, reache, belche, cough, cleanse the nose or spit either at the bourde, or in the presence of his betters or strangers, he must suppresse the sound, and shadow the sight, as much as he may conveniantly" (quoted in Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, 86). Four centuries later that advice still holds. When it was first offered, it marked the beginnings of a transformation of manners among the courtly class of early modern Europe. Ultimately, it adapted to the social and economic revolutions that produced a modern urban-industrial world and, under the sign of "civility," sought to shape the conduct of everyday life. Manners at once reveal and regulate relations of power and the formation of personal and collective identities.	1
It was Norbert Elias's provocative study of The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (1939) that first highlighted the significance of manners for the study of society. Rediscovered and translated into English two decades ago (New York, 1978), Elias continues to inspire scholarship. Anglo-American historians are still finding valuable applications for his analysis of the "civilizing process" and modifying his sweeping generalizations through close research into specific time periods. Anna Bryson's From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England offers "an interpretation of the values and principles of good manners as an aspect of the changing culture and identity of the early modern English elite" (p. 8). C. Dallett Hemphill's Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860 traces American manners—"the rule-bound and symbolic behaviors that we perform in the presence of others" (p. 3)—from a seventeenth-century concern with deference to nineteenth-century accommodations to democracy. Both works successfully demonstrate that the history of manners, in Hemphill's words, offers a "panorama of how contemporaries thought society was organized, how power was actually distributed, and how larger changes in cosmology, polity, or economy were being worked out in everyday life" (p. 4).	2
Courtesy and civility, Bryson argues, were "key concepts in the mentality of the educated elite of early modern England" (p. 20). These terms implied not just a set of specific rules governing "bodily decency and decorum, and forms of dress, address, and demeanour" (p. 2), but also "ways of structuring and interpreting the social world" (p. 20). "Courtesy" was the code of the late medieval court; it was gradually replaced by "civility" in sixteenth-century books of manners. This shift did not, Bryson argues, reflect the rise of a bourgeoisie; the world of civility explicitly excluded merchants and tradesmen from its purview. Rather, the code of civility connoted the collective citizenship of England's exclusive governing elite. The major concern of civility was bodily propriety, a self-conscious control that "distinguished the civil man from the beast, the savage, or, in practice within society, the non-gentleman" (p. 96). But bodily propriety also offered a subtle "technique of self-orientation in a complex social world" (p. 96). Conduct depended on context: a gentleman could relax his self-constraint in the presence of subordinates to indicate his superiority or assume rigorous decorum in the presence of superiors to express deference and respect.	. . .