From the New York Times, November 26, 2018:
Manspreading, Renaissance-Style: 2 Experts Weigh In on Etiquette of Centuries Past
The sign of the cuckold (left) and the “filip,” a gesture likely to cause great offense.
HOW TO BEHAVE BADLY IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND
A Guide for Knaves, Fools, Harlots, Cuckolds, Drunkards, Liars, Thieves, and Braggarts
By Ruth Goodman
314 pp. Liveright Publishing. $28.95.
WHAT WOULD MRS. ASTOR DO?
The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age
By Cecelia Tichi
303 pp. Washington Mews/New York University Press. $24.95.
“Anyone who has ever tried to learn a new language knows that it is the rude words that somehow stick in the memory.”
Oh, how I wish Ruth Goodman could be my French tutor. But settling in for one of her history lessons is better than second best. Especially since her latest book is based on the theory that “bad behavior can be so much more illuminating than the world of the respectable conformist.” And if you don’t believe her, another new etiquette guide, by Cecelia Tichi, has just turned up, offering further proof that sliding around the naughty edges of society can be as informative as it is entertaining.
The historical periods Goodman and Tichi describe in “How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England” and “What Would Mrs. Astor Do?” are separated by several centuries and a very large ocean, but each turns out to be deeply hierarchical, conspicuously consuming and obsessed with what the neighbors might think. And each has nurtured some apparently timeless human foibles. Although 21st-century Americans aren’t likely to be hauled into court, as some 16th-century Britons were, for deploying a pungent epithet like “a turd in your teeth” or engaging in the criminal offense of “scolding,” Goodman need hardly remind us that “manners, power and insult are intricately linked.”As its subtitle suggests, Goodman’s book — complete with extensive chapters on rude gestures, disgusting habits and outright violence — is the more intimately in-your-face volume. This will come as no surprise to readers of her previous books, “How to Be a Victorian” and “How to Be a Tudor,” or to fans of her rambunctious BBC historical re-enactments, most notably “Tudor Monastery Farm,” in which she experienced the full-on drudgery and muck of being a medieval peasant. Tichi, who teaches American studies and English at Vanderbilt, adopts a more detached approach to the Old Money-Robber Baron clashes that shaped our country at the turn of the 20th century. But you can sense the delight she takes, after laying out some of the rigid proscriptions that ruled New York society (“A lady will not cross a ballroom unattended”; “A lady never sits in the aisle seat if she is with a gentleman”), in pointing out that even a snob like Caroline Astor (“I have never entertained a foreigner in my life unless he comes to me with a letter of introduction”) had to adjust her standards to accommodate her own daughter’s divorce.
Although Elizabeth I ruled Britain’s aristocracy as Mrs. Astor aimed to rule her Four Hundred, the realms they inhabited were dominated by men — and men, all the way down the social ladder, were sticklers for maintaining a proper pecking order. Goodman spends many pages attempting to master the techniques for a staggering number of bows and styles of walking that could, if deployed ineptly, result in sniggering at best and ostracism at worst. In some cases, they simply appeared weird: “The high fashion walk of the 1620s gent” — which, she explains, was adapted to accommodate that period’s extremely wide-topped boots — “made him look like he was suffering from the advanced stages of venereal disease.”
Goodman is pleased to identify elbowing as the Renaissance counterpart of manspreading and wonders if our own urban gang culture can illuminate that earlier era’s “urgent need for visible respect.” You might, though, have a moment of doubt when she goes on to describe one of 17th-century London’s notorious menaces, a group of upper-class louts who took their name from a Latin poem by Virgil. Or when she introduces a rampaging band of soldiers from a slightly later period whose depredations included forcing women to do their laundry.
Gilded Age men had fewer sartorial and social restrictions, as long as they maintained a certain facade. Mr. Astor’s yacht was reportedly the scene of wild parties, but his wife, who never set foot on it, merely dismissed inquiries with a blithe “The sea air is so good for him.” Yet even a kingpin could outplay his hand, as evidenced by Tichi’s account of the exploits of the newspaper heir James Gordon Bennett Jr., with whom, she remarks, “nothing quiet was ever associated.”....
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