Book Review: Politeness in the History of English: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day

Politeness in the history of English is certainly not the first book to be written in that topic area. 2018 saw the publication of Keith Thomas’s much lauded In pursuit of civility: anners and civilization in early modern England. But that is a book written by a historian for people interested in history. The inescapable fact is that politeness, and related notions such as “civility” and “manners,” is mainly constituted in language. This is the first monograph written by a linguist focusing on the language of politeness in the history of English. To be sure, linguists have written papers on the language of English politeness in particular texts, genres, and periods, but this is the first work to encompass the broad sweep from its beginnings in the Middle Ages through to the present day. That in itself is a huge challenge, which partly explains why nobody has done it before. Seven of the ten chapters, diachronically organized, survey the development of politeness in Britain. Jucker uses a journey metaphor, specifically an “extended road trip,” to explain how he handles breadth and depth: he journeys through time, stopping to take pictures, “both close-ups of interesting details and longshot panoramas of entire sceneries” (xi). Parts of that road have been travelled by other scholars, who also have taken pictures. These pictures/studies are judiciously used, often with updatings and new framings, to fill in any gaps in Jucker’s own many studies. It would be a mistake to think that this is simply a descriptive work. Popular theories and frameworks of linguistic politeness, developed in pragmatics and interactional linguistics, are not able to provide an adequate account of how politeness works in all periods. The first chapter provides a succinct theoretical overview and sharp critique of extant work. The general approach taken by the book is a mixed one, combining both a first-order approach (i.e., one that focuses on what non-academic users do and their understandings) in the examination of politeness vocabulary and discourses on politeness, and a second-order approach (i.e., one that focuses on what academic observers do and their concepts) in theorizing about, for example, conceptualizations of politeness (e.g., the notions of “negative politeness” and “positive politeness”). Regarding the latter, the book contains some important innovations, as I will note below. 1005831 ENGXXX10.1177/00754242211005831Journal of English LinguisticsBook Review book-review2021