IN PURSUIT OF CIVILITY

MANNERS AND CIVILIZATION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

KEITH THOMAS Yale, 480pp, £25, Oldie price £16.98 inc p&p

Historian Sir Keith Thomas, now 85, follows his panoramic socio-cultural histories, Religion and the Decline of Magic and Man and the Natural World, with this study of how the English formed their notions of proper conduct – and its opposite.

In the Times, Gerard Degroot was enthralled by Thomas’s ‘intelligence and urbane sensibility’, noting that ‘In early modern England – the period from the Reformation until the 18th century – it was commonly assumed that civility was new. The Romans, it was thought, had once civilised Britain by bringing culture and the law. When they left, the country descended into darkness and savagery.’ In Literary Review, Blair Worden was similarly full of admiration for an exhaustively detailed feat of research: ‘No one masters so many primary and secondary sources. For more than 60 years Thomas has been undertaking one of the high enterprises of modern historical scholarship: the re-creation of the mentalities of English society in the period roughly from 1500 to 1800.’

Philip Hensher in the Spectator thought the book ‘marvellous’ and was fascinated by its delineation of what, and who, was thought uncivilised. ‘These alternative people

were labelled “barbarians” or “savages” when found abroad or on the Celtic fringe. If the unacceptable was found within England, rural or impoverished, they would be called “clowns” or “clodhoppers”.’

Hensher thrilled to Thomas’s use of contemporary quotation, ‘a huge polyphony, as different voices disagree, conflict, reinforce each other and undermine another’s point of view’. However, in the New

Statesman, Frances Wilson wondered if Thomas’s famous method of writing his quotations on pieces of paper which are then cut up and filed in thousands of envelopes, made it sometimes seem as though he’s ‘emptied his envelopes on to the page’. The subject is just too huge for a mere 450 pages, ‘like trying to put the Atlantic Ocean in a cupboard.’