Historical Etiquette

This book is a groundbreaking study of etiquette in the nineteenth century when the success of etiquette books reached unprecedented heights in Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. It positions etiquette as a fully-fledged theoretical concept within the fields of politeness studies and historical pragmatics. After tracing the origin of etiquette back to Spanish court protocol, the analysis takes a novel approach to key aspects of etiquette: its highly coercive and intricate scripts; the liminal rituals of social gatekeeping; the fear for blunders; the obsession with precedence. Interrogating the complex relationship between historical etiquette and adjacent notions of politeness, conduct, morality, convention, and ritual, the study prompts questions on gender stereotyping and class privilege surrounding the present-day etiquette revival. Through adopting a unique comparative approach and a corpus-based methodology this study seeks to revitalise our understandings of etiquette. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics and pragmatics, as well as those in neighbouring fields such as literary criticism, gender studies and family life, domestic and urban spaces.

• politeness studies
• (im)politeness
• historical pragmatics
• conduct
• morality
• ritual
• discernment
• literary criticism
• non-fiction prose
• history of fashion
• advice literature

“From Spanish court protocol in the sixteenth century to present-day online advice, this extremely rich book traces the fascinating history of the concept of etiquette in Western culture from a politeness-theoretic angle.” (Andreas H. Jucker, Professor of English Linguistics, University of Zurich)

“Annick Paternoster's book is a timely, insightful and accessible contribution to the field of historical politeness research. Paternoster provides a fascinating insight into the realm of etiquette manuals in Europe, which is an important albeit regretfully neglected area of politeness research. The book is a must read for both academics and students with interest in the history of social interaction in Europe.” (Dániel Z. Kádár, Ordinary Member of Academia Europaea, Chair Professor, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, Research Professor, Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics)

“This book sheds light on a past that countless novels, films and TV series have popularized: the world of nineteenth-century polite society, of dinners, receptions and dances, where the social skills of men and women were crucial for the establishment and maintenance of their place in society. That world obeyed strictly codified rules of appropriate behaviour – rules that the author investigates in a broad range of Italian, French, Dutch, British and American texts while placing them in accurate socio-historical perspective.” (Marina Dossena, University of Bergamo, Italy)

• Istituto di studi italiani, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland

  Annick Paternoster

Annick Paternoster is a Lecturer at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. She lectures Rhetoric and Stylistics at the Istituto di studi italiani, where she pursues an interdisciplinary research agenda based on historical pragmatics, the pragmatics of politeness and metapragmatics of Italian. Born in Belgium, she holds a PhD from the University of Antwerp.