Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England

1989 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-605 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence E. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Polite Society ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Aesthetic Standard ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In the early eighteenth century, the language of politeness became a major fixture of English discourse. Centring on the term ‘politeness’ and consisting of a vocabulary of key words (such as ‘refinement’, ‘manners’, ‘character’, ‘breeding’, and ‘civility’) and a range of qualifying attributes (‘free’, ‘easy’, ‘natural’, ‘graceful’, and many others), the language was used to make a wide range of objects intelligible. Though the word ‘polite’ had been in the English language from at least the fifteenth century, denoting the state of being polished or neat in quite literal and concrete ways, the term entered on its significant career only in the mid-seventeenth century, when it began to convey the meanings of studied social behaviour of the sort inspired by and associated with princely courts. However, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, ‘politeness’ grew to cover a range of meanings, considerably freed from the initial association with courts. Several broad categories of usage of the term ‘polite’ are indicative: as a behavioural and moral standard for members of an elite (e.g. ‘polite gentlemen’, ‘polite ladies’, ‘polite society’, ‘polite conversation’); as an aesthetic standard for many kinds of human artifacts and products (e.g. ‘polite arts’, ‘polite towns’, ‘polite learning’, ‘polite buildings’); and as a way of generalizing about and characterizing society and culture (‘polite age’, ‘polite nation’, ‘polite people’). In the latter usage, ‘politeness’ was frequently deployed retrospectively as an attribute of classical civilizations. ‘Politeness’ helped recast the renaissance model of history, in which modernity was separated from its true ancestor, the ancient world, by the vast dark gulf of the middle ages: the ‘politest’ nations were ancient Greece and ancient Rome; the ‘politest’ ages, the spells of Hellenic and Roman creativity.

Moll Flanders

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Defoe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Title Page ◽  
Adoptive Family ◽  
Moll Flanders ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

‘Twelve Year a Whore, fives times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent’: so the title page of this extraordinary novel describes the career of the woman known as Moll Flanders, whose real name we never discover. And so, in a tour-de-force of writing by the businessman, political satirist, and spy Daniel Defoe, Moll tells her own story, a vivid and racy tale of a woman's experience in the seamy side of life in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England and America. Born in Newgate prison, and seduced in the home of her adoptive family, she learns to live off her wits, defying the traditional depiction of women as helpless victims. First published in 1722, and one of the earliest novels in the English language, its account of opportunism, endurance, and survival speaks as strongly to us today as it did to its original readers.

Generating Captain Cook and Paul Kane into Published Authors: Case Studies of a Book History Model for Exploration and Travel Writing (pp 7-56)

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian MacLaren
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

As more and more research occurs into published English-language travel literature, the production of individual texts, rather than their authorship alone, demands attention. Both the unreliability of the text as entirely the traveller's or explorer's own and the question of whether or not the text narrates only his own experience and observations have made problematical the matter of interpretation. Recently, Percy G. Adams has shown in Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (1983) how, because travel writing issued often enough from writers who did no more than move around in an armchair, this genre and the novel grew indistinguishable for a time in the early eighteenth century. From then on, travel literature would often exemplify a more complex, or at least less straightforward, relation between experience and language than one might expect.

POLITENESS AND THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BRITISH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 869-898 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAWRENCE E. KLEIN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Personal Accomplishment ◽  
Important Place ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Polite Society ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Semantic Associations ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
British Culture

Politeness has assumed an important place in recent interpretations of eighteenth-century Britain by historians and historically minded scholars in other fields. The use of politeness as an analytic category has relied on varying assessments of the eighteenth-century semantic associations of the term, which included attentiveness to form, sociability, improvement, worldliness, and gentility. Scholars have used politeness in one or more of these senses to characterize distinctive aspects of eighteenth-century British culture: the comportment of the body in isolation and in social interaction; the material equipment of everyday life; the changing configurations and uses of domestic and public spaces; skills and aptitudes that both constituted personal accomplishment and shaped larger cultural enterprises such as religion, learning, the arts, and science; and important aspects of associational and institutional life. Thus, eighteenth-century Britain was polite in that a wide range of quite different activities have been identified as bearing the stamp of the eighteenth-century meanings of ‘politeness’. Furthermore, what made eighteenth-century Britain a polite society was not its horizontal division between polite and non-polite persons but rather the wide access of a range of persons to activities and competencies that contemporaries considered ‘polite’.

scholarly journals REWRITING THE GESTA NORMANNORUM DUCUM IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY: SIMON DE PLUMETOT'S BREVIS CRONICA COMPENDIOSA DUCUM NORMANNIE

Traditio ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 385-435
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN POHL ◽  
RICHARD ALLEN
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Book Collecting

This article is dedicated to Liesbeth van Houts, editor of the Gesta Normannorum ducum, generous mentor, colleague, and friend.This article offers an analysis, edition, and translation of the Brevis cronica compendiosa ducum Normannie, a historiographical account of the dukes of Normandy and their deeds, written at the turn of the fifteenth century by the Norman jurist and man of letters, Simon de Plumetot (1371–1443). Having all but escaped the attention of modern scholars, this study is the first to examine and publish the Brevis cronica. It not only demonstrates that the work is of greater importance than its rather scrappy form might at first suggest, but it also looks to place the text within the broader context of Simon's literary and bibliophilic practices and to determine its raison d’être. In doing so, it argues that the Brevis cronica was perhaps created as part of a much larger historiographical project, namely an extended chronicle of Normandy, written in the vernacular, the text of which is now lost. By exploring these important issues, the article sheds new light on a wide range of topics, from early humanist book collecting to the writing of history in France in the later Middle Ages.

Burke's Vehemence and the Rhetoric of Historical Exaggeration

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-198
Author(s):  
Steven Stryer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strategy I

This article seeks to explain Edmund Burke's notorious verbal vehemence as the consequence of a deliberate rhetorical strategy. I argue that over the course of a thirty-year parliamentary career, Burke relied on sharply formulated historical contrasts in order to express his opposition to the policies of successive ministries and warn of threats to the nation's defining achievements. Through the use of four distinct syntactical patterns, Burke cultivated a style of hyperbole which exaggerated both the failings of the present and the virtues of the national past, focusing on two periods in particular: the High Middle Ages and the early eighteenth-century era of Whig Oligarchy.

Politics, Patronage and Newtonianism: the Cambridge Example

1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gascoigne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Alma Mater ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

Oxford has never quite recovered from Matthew Arnold's description of his belovedalma materas a ‘home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names and impossible loyalties’. 1 While in popular stereotype Oxford is associated with such movements as the laudians, the Jacobites and the tractarians, Cambridge, by contrast, is seen as the home of more radical and reformist creeds: the puritans, the latitudinarians and the academic reformers of the nineteenth century. Consequently, we are predisposed to think it unremarkable that in the early eighteenth century Cambridge almost totally shed the last vestiges of the scholastic academic order which had its origins in the Tiigh middle ages and, in its place, adopted a style of education which, in its overriding emphasis on mathematics, departed significantly from the curriculum offered at Oxford.

scholarly journals The Veto Power of the State Governor

1917 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Fairlie
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Veto Power ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
Negative Power ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Norman French ◽  
The Right ◽  
To Receive

The term “veto” has been traced from the power of the tribune of the plebs in ancient Rome to annul or suspend the acts of other public authorities. From the establishment of the Roman tribune, that official had the right of intercession (intercessio), to cancel any command of a consul which infringed the liberties of a citizen; and this was gradually extended to other administrative acts and even to decrees of the senate. The word veto (I forbid) was at least occasionally used by the tribune in such cases.But historically what is called the veto power of American executives is derived from the legislative power of the British Crown. Until the fifteenth century statutes in England were enacted by the king on his own initiative or in response to petitions. From that time parliament presented bills in place of petitions; and statutes were enacted by the king “by and with the advice and consent of the lords …. and the commons …. and by the authority of the same.” The king's assent was still necessary; and without this assent a bill was not law. For two hundred years the Crown continued to exercise the negative power of declining to accept bills, not by any formal act of disapproval, but by the polite response in old Norman French, “le roy s'avisera.” Since the beginning of the eighteenth century no bill which has passed parliament has failed to receive the royal assent; but the old form of enacting laws is still in use.

scholarly journals Snapshot or Signpost? The Role of English in Tadhg Ó Neachtain’s Early Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Liam Mac Mathúna ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Code Mixing ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Seán Ó Neachtain (c. 1640–1729) and his son Tadhg (c. 1671–c. 1752) were at the centre of an extensive circle of Gaelic scholars in the city of Dublin in the early part of the eighteenth century. Seán Ó Neachtain composed a broad range of creative literature. Although primarily written in Irish, his works include examples of Irish/English code-mixing as well as pieces composed entirely in English. His son, Tadhg Ó Neachtain, is credited with having written over 25 surviving manuscripts. He makes considerable use of English sources and of English itself in a number of these manuscripts, which are either pedagogical in nature, devoted to geography and history, or are characterised by frequent commonplace entries referring to contemporary events. This paper examines the interaction of the two languages in these manuscripts, exploring (1) the use of English language sources (textbooks and Dublin newspapers), (2) the content of the English portions of the manuscripts in question, and (3) the relationship of the English material to the Irish in the immediate compositional context. The paper seeks to assess whether the permeating bilingualism of these manuscripts is merely indicative of the contemporary socio-linguistic milieu in which the Ó Neachtains functioned, or can be regarded as harbinger of the subsequent community language change from Irish to English.

scholarly journals Key indicators and issues of the development of culture and leisure in Moscow

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (Extra-D) ◽  
pp. 506-516
Author(s):  
Alexey Nikolaevich Boyko ◽  
Elena Evgenevna Kabanova ◽  
Tatiana Anatolyevna Evstratova ◽  
Elena Vladimirovna Litvinova ◽  
Veronika Andreevna Danilova
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Close Relative ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Huge Number ◽  
Object Condition ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Original Sense ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Key Indicators

The concept of culture exists in almost all languages and is used in a wide range of situations, with a huge number of meanings in different areas of human activity. In its original sense, the word "culture" has never referred to any particular object, condition, or content. The notion of culture first appears in Latin. Poets and scholars of Ancient Rome have used it in their treatises and letters to mean "to cultivate" something or "cultivate" it to improve it. In ancient Greece, a close relative of the term culture has been paideia, which refers to "internal culture" or, in other words, the "culture of the soul". In Latin sources, the word first appears in a treatise on agriculture by the Roman statesman and writer Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 B.C.), whose Latin translation of the title sounds something like this: agroculture. Hence, the word "culture" is originally used as an agronomic term.

A perspective on “impoliteness” in early modern Romanian court and diplomatic interactions

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-121
Author(s):  
Mihaela-Viorica Constantinescu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
First Order ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Court Life ◽  
Emotional Effects ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract The paper focuses on impoliteness dealt with from a historical pragmatics perspective (Jucker [ed.] 1995; Culpeper and Kádár [eds] 2010; Jucker and Taavitsainen [eds] 2010; etc.). The approach adopted in this study favours a first-order im/politeness view (Watts et al. [eds] 1992; Eelen 2001; etc.), which is mainly concerned with the evaluation of behavioural elements by the participants in a communicative event. As im/politeness in Romanian is under-researched from a historical sociopragmatic perspective, this analysis tries to fill a gap exploring the seventeenth to early-eighteenth century cultural patterns and their characteristics in only two main Romanian provinces, Moldavia and Wallachia (separate states from the Middle Ages until their union in 1859). My analysis is limited to the understanding and practices of “impoliteness” in official settings (court and diplomatic interactions), aiming to capture the production and evaluation, as well as some self-reflexive aspects (Eelen 2001; Kádár 2013) and emotional effects of “impoliteness”. The corpus consists of Moldavian and Wallachian chronicles from the second half of the seventeenth-century and first half of the eighteenth-century, presenting local court life and also scenes at the Ottoman court.

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