Early Modern Civil Discourses

This collection explores the concept of civility in the early modern period. It addresses a range of writings in English and Scottish--among them, conduct manuals, colonial tracts, diaries, letters, dialogues, poetry, drama, chronicles--by English, Welsh and Scots men and women in and about the Atlantic archipelago. It explores the many meanings of civility in the early modern period; it recovers some of the lost associations of civility as well as the complex use of the adjectives "civil" and "barbarous" in cultural and colonial encounters.

Jennifer Richards is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle.