The Debate on Problems and Isms: A New Interpretation

The term ‘courtesy books’ is commonly used to name a genre of literature, which has flourished since the Middle Ages in Europe, to teach and to formulate the rules of conduct in social life. Courtesy books could be viewed as the embodiment of the ideal values and social constructions in the periods of their writing. The reading of courtesy books and the practice of polite conduct were also a significant means to express social distinction in the medieval and modern times. A cornerstone for the study of courtesy books was built by Norbert Elias with his Civilizing Process, first published in 1939. Its English translation in 1978 has prompted more investigations of courtesy books and the ideas about social behavior since then. This article reviews the development of this research in the recent thirty years. It particularly focuses on those works done on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when a turning point occurred in the whole ‘civilizing process’, as Elias advocated. It includes six sections. The first introduces the background of the writing and appropriation of courtesy books in late medieval and early modern Europe. The second discusses their characteristics developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Based on the first two sections, the following ones introduce and analyze Elias’s work and other variant researches on this topic in three consecutive periods: the 1980s, the 1990s and post-2000. As a whole, this review article illustrates the change and breakthrough of the scholarly investigation of courtesy books and their related ideas in the recent thirty years. In the end, it specifies a few topics which need further research for enriching our understanding of courtesy culture in Europe.