In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England. Keith Thomas. The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018. xvi + 356 pp. $45

Manners, which in earlier centuries were understood to embrace broader customs of behavior and even, during the high tide of Puritanism, moral and sexual comportment (a link largely broken, the present book notes, by the end of the eighteenth century except among the most fervent of evangelicals), are very much the constructions of time and space, as the Enlightenment philosophers knew, and earlier writers such as Montaigne sensed. [...]extreme differences in customs and behavior, observed in foreign travel during the early modern era (and as far back as Herodotus's accounts of non-Greek “barbarians”), especially in descriptions of alien terrains and their indigenous occupants, provided a valuable mirror for contemporaries, and eventually a stimulus to systematic speculation about what the sociologist Norbert Elias would call “the civilizing process.” Thomas is too subtle a scholar to regard this process as simplistically linear, and indeed some of the most fascinating passages in the book concern anomalies—relics of past forms of behavior that lingered on, or examples of surprisingly bad behavior at a time when social hierarchy was more highly rigid than it later became—for instance the sundry episodes of lords and ladies being jeered at or mocked by their inferiors in the streets of London.