Introduction

Abstract

Ideas of ‘civility’ are implicated in defining the period 1500–1700 as both the ‘Renaissance’ and the ‘early modern’. Civility can be called upon to identify the limits of this period (Renaissance versus the Middle Ages or the Enlightenment) or to locate its place within a longer historical process (Modernity). One influential distinction between the ‘Renaissance’ and the ‘Enlightenment’, for instance, rests on an opposition between the concepts ‘civic’ and ‘civil’. The political ethos of the Renaissance, argues J. G. A. Pocock, is distinguishable by its classical forms of civic humanism: an ideology of active citizenship within a closely knit, aristocratic political community. In contrast, the rise of an increasingly commercial social sphere in the eighteenth century was dominated by concepts of civility and manners. The Renaissance citizen, Pocock explains, ‘required the autonomy of real property’ as well as the right to bear arms: it is ‘hard to see’, he argues, how such a being ‘could become involved in exchange relationships, or in relationships governed by the media of exchange … without becoming involved in dependence and corruption’. In contrast, in the eighteenth century there emerged a new ‘social psychology’ which held that commercial exchange ‘evoked passions and refined them into manners’.¹