This volume is a tribute to Sir Keith Thomas, one of Britain's greatest living historians, by distinguished scholars who have been his students. They describe the changing meanings of civility and civil manners since the sixteenth century, showing how the terms were used with respect to different people--women, the English and Welsh, imperialists, businessmen--and their effects in fields as varied as sexual relations, religion, urban politics, and private life.

These original essays study ritual language and parallelism (the strict ordering of words and phrases in alternative, duplicate form). The introduction puts the topic in historical perspective and what was once viewed as a composition form unique to ancient Hebrew is now seen as a feature common to literatures around the world. Here is the first book to compare in detail living traditions of parallel composition. Yet, despite the diversity of languages discussed by the contributors, their materials are drawn from a single cultural area still unknown to most specialists: Eastern Indonesia. All...