From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England.

Anna Bryson. From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England.

(Oxford Studies in Social History.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 311 pp. $75. ISBN: 0-19-821765-X.

Theodore K. Rabb. Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561-1629. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. xiii + 412 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-691-02694-7.

In Renaissance England, "Manners maketh man" was a commonplace motto, Anna Bryson argues, "neither anachronistic nor ridiculous" (3). Yet "What are manners?" she asks. "Are they simply a mass of custom and habit sanctified by tradition and familiarity? Are they collective symptoms of repression arising from the always problematic relation of a society to 'natural' human impulses and biological realities? Are they a kind of symbolic protocol that passively reflects social hierarchy?" (276). Although the subject has been largely overlooked, there are several manuals and conduct books that speak to manners; the difficulty is that there is little record of social practices that would demonstrate how prescriptive such manuals and books were, and whether, given the degree of early modern literacy, they affected all stations of society

Bryson confronts the problem directly by merging three disciplines in reading the extant texts: in psychoanalytical terms, manners are seen as internalized rules of decency and good behavior that allow social participation; in sociological terms, manners are codifications of group behavior that can lead to "large-scale social and political change" (11); for anthropologists, manners are either substantive rules of conduct that enforce law or morality or ceremonial rules which have their own primary use and significance within an identifiable group such as a state or nation. She traces all these functions to a single ur-text: Erasmus's De Civilitate Morum Puerilium, translated by Robert Whytyngton in a bilingual edition as A Lytell Booke of Good Maners for Chyldren (1532). This nor only provided the chief term for the period -- civility -- but led to rules in grammar books (such as William Lily's) and school foundations (such as the Heath Grammar School), preceding the other basic works of the period, Giovanni Della Casa's II Galateo (1558; translated 1576), Stefano Guazzo's Civile Conversation (4 volumes; translated through the 1580s), and the host of advice books, conduct manuals, household treatises, rhetorics, and books on letter-writing that followed over the next 40 years. One preoccupation of "compleat" treatises for men concerning gentility was preparation for use at court (where Castiglione had influence, following Hoby's translation); another was books for women concerned with domesticity and ethics and arguing for modesty and chaste behavior.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the common word "civil," growing from notions of chivalric gentilesse, became opposed to "barbaric" and was extended (at first in 1600 in William Vaughan's moralistic Golden-Grove) to the conduct of the individual, the household, and the country, seen as correlative and even homologous. The authority of the schoolmaster over his pupils became a model for authority in other spheres of life, such as the household, the church, and the court. As such standards were reinforced, with the help of works from Italy, Spain, and France, social stations became increasingly defined and personal relationships were seen as superior and dominant or inferior and subordinate. Even books of rhetoric and treatises on writing, speaking, and gestures so prescribed social practices that by 1609 William Fiston could write that "manners... are lively representations of the dispositions of the mind" (109). Social change accompanied such cultural practices: the family became a more private sphere a nd the market and court became more public; and "old-style gentleman-servants were being squeezed out by laws against retainers, the influx of unsuitable lower-rank menials, and the growth of puritanism" (142).

The emphasis on civility was nor uniformly approved: some found it led to effeminacy, to superficiality, or to the sense that manners could displace morals rather than reflect them. Philibert de Vienne's Le Philosophe de Court (1547; translated 1575) satirized courtly manners as "but too please and be gracious to others, whereby is obteyned honour and reputation" (201); "the semblances and the apparuances of all things cunningly couched, are the pryncipall supporters of our philosophie." Even Bacon commented that "excusation, cessions, modesty itself well-governed, are but arts of ostentation" (218). Indeed, by the later seventeenth century, "overdetermined civility" (275) led to libertinism -- to gentleman rakes, pornographic poetry (such as Rochester's), and to "essentially predatory and misogynistic" behavior toward women (271).

For Bryson, the shift from medieval courtesy honoring situation and rank led to far more inclusive codes of conduct that regulated both private and public behavior at all levels and functions of the commonwealth. While none of these observations is surprising, the value of her study is in the rich complication of the issues through the examination of various printed texts, including those translated from the Continent. Printed texts: there is nothing here of private letters or diaries, nothing from court records; nothing from testimonials and wills that might indicate ways in which such controlling ideas -- dispositions of the mind -- were actually carried our. Bryson recognized the incompleteness of her sources at the outset; what is needed now is a complementary book that will trace the implications of the various threads of the behavioral tapestry she so carefully weaves from printed sources alone.

Abundance and paucity of material has also been a fundamental problem of Theodore K. Rabb as he has spent the past thirty years, he says, attempting to learn the full details of the life of Sir Edwin Sandys. On the one hand he has found too much -- "the minutiae of parliamentary procedure and the intricacies of trade and colonization in London"; on the other hand, there has been too little -- "the absence of personal papers and the paucity of documentation beyond his public actions" (ix). This biography, then, forthrightly reflects the available material, with little on Sandys's personal life but with great detail on his parliamentary actions and considerable detail on his investments in and direction of New World exploration through the Virginia and East India Companies. This is a pity. Sandys's father was a radical Protestant leader in the early days of the Reformation but, reforming himself, became in time Elizabeth's bishop of London, negotiating her via media between the excommunication by Pius V and Th omas Cartwright's staunchly Puritan sermonizing. Later she named him Archbishop of York. Young Edwin was educated by Mulcaster and, when his father moved north, at Oxford and later at the Inns of Court. He left Middle Temple to accompany the earl of Lincoln on an embassy to the land-grave of Hesse and later, with persmission of the Privy Council, extended his travels through the Netherlands and Germany. In 1599 he wrote A Relation of the State of Religion, an impressive, comprehensive, and often ponderous work, "the product of an academic mind concerned more with content than form" (21) that in its measured examination "still provides the first sustained and detailed evidence of the man's outlook and cast of mind" (20). It went through fourteen editions "encompassing four languages and exciting the interest of the most celebrated leaders of Europe's intellectual life" (45). While the content of this book is examined here in detail, there is little said of Sandys's several marriages and thirteen children and s urprisingly little made of his life as a protege of William Cecil and the decisive patron of Hooker, alone guaranteeing the publication of Hooker's Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie.

Instead, in the manner of J. E. Neale, four-fifths of the volume is given over to a detailed daily account of Sandys's life in the Parliaments of 1604 (he was knighted by Elizabeth after a brief association with the court in 1603), 1606, 1614 ("the addled Parliament"), 1621, and (with much less influence) 1624 and 1628. His persistent opposition to the Union, his opposition to wardships, and his support of free trade are cited as his means of ascendancy in Commons (chapter 4). His leadership was characterized by his powers of speech and negotiation, his reliance on logic and reason, and his common sense. His opposition to subsidies (the Great Contract) in 1610 led to increased autonomy of Commons -- in advocating "their own vision of the welfare of the realm, the gentry M.P.s were assuming an independent position in the polity of England" (173) under Sandys's leadership. His control of Commons continued in the Parliament of 1614 where he carefully laid down principles of action and refrained from entering in to the details of dispute, preferring to act as an "elder statesman" (181); the Parliament was addled because pressure from the Spanish ambassador caused James to become more impatient with the complaints of Commons. Sandys's reasonableness faded in 1621, and Rabb argues that his "boldness in Parliament" (261) caused his arrest on June 16; he was placed under the custody of the sheriff of London for five weeks. He was, nevertheless, reelected to Parliament in 1624 with the support of Charles I and Buckingham so that he could help them obtain speedy action against Spain. But clearly, as he received his knighthood in the waning days of Elizabeth I, so his hopes of favor peaked in March 1625, at the death of James, and he had difficulty in being reelected to succeeding parliaments.

Extant documents demonstrate for Rabb that Sandys's influence also waxed and waned in the settlement of the New World. In 1609, together with Bacon, he drew up the second charter for the Jamestown colony; was a director of the Virginia company from at least 1609; and was a member of the East India Company from 161;1 and a founder of the Bermuda Company. He was the most active of the London gentry in establishing colonies and the M.P. most closely identified with trade issues in Commons. Yet he seems to have been less interested in windfall profits than in national policy; he saw the new outposts as an issue of national expansion and empire, "another public trust" (326). But complaints of mismanagement by the Virginia Company to the Privy Council in 1620 and its collapse in 1623, innocently augmented by his brother's support of the opposition, led to his undoing. Sandys was indicted on four counts: the loss of money in the venture; the lack of the colony's productivity despite constant emigration; the assault s of Indians; and the discord among investors. Despite the dissolution of the Virginia Company, Rabb argues, admitting Sandys's mismanagement should take part of the blame fails nevertheless to recognize that had Sandys lost hope in Jamestown and not continually fed it with more settlers, the colony would have been annihilated. Instead, it survived.

Arguing meticulously from archival evidence, Rabb is unable to give a portrait of the whole man and, with the unevenness of evidence, does not integrate the private and public nor the man in Parliament with the man financing voyages. Nor do the documents provide a full portrait even of the public man. Hence Rabb's title: he sketches for us a portrait of a gentleman who, largely through his firm leadership in Commons, was vital to the rise of the gentry under James. On the one hand, this is meant to show the developing power of the gentry and of Commons; on the other, it is meant to demonstrate the mistaken views of current revisionist historians. Instead, the earlier work of Gardiner is partially confirmed in this "biography," so long in gestation, so detailed in its presentation, and so arresting in its admittedly partial narrative.