Dictionnaire raisonne de la politesse et du savoir-vivre du moyen age jusqu'a nos jours.

Alain Montandon and his team of over twenty scholars from throughout France have created a monumental compendium of the ideals and rules of behavior and social interaction as they were represented in handbooks of manners and literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present. Their ambitious goal is to bring to light the major concepts that gave form to the written representation of social communication and interaction from the Middle Ages to the present. The invention of the printing press gave rise to the proliferation of handbooks of manners, but the codes and the relationship to cultural and literary history took different forms through the ages.

The structure of the work makes it an accessible and useful tool for students and scholars of cultural studies, social history, and literature who focus on the social interactions in aristocratic and bourgeois settings in Western Europe. The work will appeal to the specialist as well as to the undergraduate student of French history or literature who wants to know more about such topics as bienseances or mesure. Of interest to the specialist is the overview and development of social terms that modified their meanings and applications over the centuries. One example can be seen in the evolution of the term discretion (or discretion) which changed from the notion of discernment - current through the seventeenth century - to take on the sense of reserve, restraint, and modesty in the twentieth century.

Structured in alphabetical order, the work lends itself to use as a reference book. In a series of over forty essays, each essay is a synthesis of the historic and semantic settings which gave rise to the concept in question. The discussion is followed by a solid primary and secondary bibliography with cross references to related essays and terms elsewhere in the work. Such cross referencing reveals that in the highly ritualized society of the Renaissance court, the concepts are so closely interwoven that a discussion of affectation leads to mention of the ideal of sprezzatura and distinction. Affectation, meaning both laborious pursuit and deception, runs counter to the spirit of natural, inherited grace of the young courtier. The cross- referencing allows the reader to become familiar with the body of texts which forms the corpus for the essays.

Another principal shift in conventions governing polite and appropriate behavior concerns attention paid to the circumstances surrounding a situation. From the Renaissance on, appropriate behavior depended on four circumstances: 1) a person should act according to the individual's age and condition; 2) the individual should take into consideration the station and quality of the person with whom he or she is interacting; 3) it is important to pay attention to the time and 4) place of the encounter. There is no universal standard; all behavior is dictated by the above circumstances. Dominique Bertrand points out that after the Revolution, social hierarchy begins to be replaced by sexual conventions - conventions are not the same for the two sexes. With Romanticism, heart and mind takes precedence over circumstance. In commerce, need dictates how common man treats the great and the rich. Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, there is an attempt to develop rules of behavior for all seasons, a point of view apparent in the Baroness d'Orval's Usages mondains (1901). Although the circumstances change through the years, one constant is the need to be guided by intuition and judgment in social situations.

The authors of the individual essays explore actions, such as games and dancing, along with qualities and conditions. One of the most fascinating essays, written by Caroline Jacot-Grapa, describes the evolution of the toilette. She describes the origin of the toilette as an imitation of the king's vestmental ritual - the grand and petit lever. It was a feminine space in the ancien regime. Chardin's Toilette du matin (around 1740) marks the emergence of the dressing ritual from the aristocratic convention of the lady in love regarding herself in her mirror to the bourgeois space of the family, where the mother arranges her daughter's hair and cap. In the eighteenth century, the toilette becomes a space of privilege, where to be invited to be present at the toilette marks a ritual socialization with an intimate friend. Grapa cites the moment when Saint-Preux enters Julie's dressing room in La Nouvelle Heloise. Balzac's Cousine Bette evokes the coquettery of the Parisian courtesan; finally, in the twentieth century, it is the erotic charge of the toilette which dominates on the stage and in film.

Two elements contribute to the success of this useful and extensive reference work. First, it is the fruit of the labor of a network of scholars ably coordinated by the research team centered at the Universite Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. Second, the work draws on a common corpus of works from throughout Western Europe (Italy, Spain, Germany, England, and France). While the citations are not limited to printed works but call also on film and painting, the common corpus allows the reader to revisit these texts from different perspectives over the course of the work and in a variety of contexts. The modern reader learns to regret the gradual simplification from the rich texture of social conventions and behavior that characterized the art of living in the Renaissance to the "one-size-fits-all" lists of manners or guide books for cross-cultural communication that constitute the most recent contributions of our century to the dynamic field of savoir-vivre.

DEBORAH N. LOSSE Arizona State University