A similar civilizing process occurred in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the Western frontier. Mountain men and other loners living in the wilderness, vagrants, and cowboys were singled out and put under the watchful eye of preachers, social reformers, and women in an effort to civilize their behavior and transform them into upright and productive citizens, each personally accountable for his behavior.
The new obsession with civility took a number of different forms in Europe. For example, nakedness, which had not been the subject of consternation in the past, suddenly became a major cause of public concern. The Reformers reminded people that being clothed was what distinguished man from beast. Long hair was also condemned. Bacon noted that “beasts are more hairy than man . . . and savage man more than civil.”
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Working at night was also suspect. The English jurist Sir Edward Coke made the point that night is “the time wherein man is to rest, and wherein beasts run about seeking their prey.”
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Animal epithets were also used with greater frequency to denigrate others. John Milton derided his foes by calling them “cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.”
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The dinner table proved to be the most important classroom for civilizing human behavior and creating a sense of the individual. In 1526, Erasmus published his book on proper table manners and etiquette. It quickly became the bible for civility among the newly emerging bourgeois class.
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Eating was a communal affair in medieval Europe. Dinner was often a bawdy event and, at least in the homes of nobles, a spectacle with troubadours, clowns, acrobats, and assorted pets roaming the room. By modern standards, medieval meals were raucous and unpredictable gatherings that had the feel of a Roman bacchanalia. People sat on long, flat benches—others milled around the edges engaging in loud banter. The floors were littered with the garbage from present as well as past meals. Erasmus described the scene as an “ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrement of dogs and cats, and everything that is nasty.”
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Food was served in no particular order and came to the table in pretty much the same condition it was in just after being killed. Whole birds, including sparrows, egrets, and herons, were heaped one on top of another in huge dishes and served to the guests. Stews containing whole rabbits and other small animals were mixed together with vegetables and flowers, and served en masse.
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Custards or fruit tarts might come before, with, or after a stew or game bird, depending on whether they were ready or on the whim of the host.
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Utensils were scarce. People ate with their hands or from a trencher, which was a thick slice of stale bread. At the end of the meal, the diners dropped their soaked, stained bread onto the floor for waiting dogs.
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Erasmus and others were anxious to elevate the dining experience from a “bestial affair” and place it on a more civilized plane. They introduced a number of innovations designed to separate diners from the animals they killed and later consumed and to create boundaries between the diners themselves.
The practice of bringing an entire animal to the table—a lamb or a pig—to be carved with much solemnity by the host lost favor to the more civilized practice of having servants carve the meat out of sight, in the kitchen.
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The authors of
The Habits of Good Society,
published in 1859, condemned the “unwieldy barbarism” of carving an entire joint in front of one’s guests.
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The knife, which had long been the only utensil used by diners, was too close a reminder of the hunt and slaughter of the prey. When the Chinese first saw Europeans eating food with knives, they were aghast. “The Europeans are barbarians,” they would say. “They eat with their swords.”
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The fork was introduced to the table in the late medieval era, first in Venice, then later in Germany, England, and elsewhere.
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The fork allowed people, in a subtle way, to distance themselves from too close an association with the animals they consumed.
A radical change also took place in the way people ate their food. In the medieval era, people supped from the common bowl, oftentimes spitting back bits of gristle into the cauldron as it made its rounds. A common ladle was introduced in the late medieval era to prevent the guests’ mouths from touching the bowl. By the early modern era, the common bowl was done away with altogether. Spoons were added to the utensils, and each person was given his or her own bowl. Similarly, the shared tablecloth, which had customarily served as a common napkin to wipe grease and gravy off hands and mouths, gave way to individual napkins.
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By the nineteenth century, a bourgeois dining table might look more like a well-stocked surgical table. Each setting might include several different-sized wineglasses, each tailored to a particular wine, as well as an array of forks, knives, and spoons, each used for a specific part of the meal.
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And the meal itself was served in a rational, orderly fashion, beginning with an aperitif, followed usually by a soup, a fish dish, meat, salad, dessert, and coffee. The chaotic, slovenly, disorganized medieval table was transformed into an orderly, efficient, rational dining experience. Human hands never touched the animals consumed, and there was little in the way the meal was prepared to suggest any connection between the diners and their prey.
The changing configuration of living arrangements between the late medieval era and the early modern era also came to play a decisive role in fostering the creation of the autonomous individual. The household, in the medieval era, was a very public place, with few boundaries separating family, kin, and neighbors. By the eighteenth century, the public household had metamorphosed into a private domicile, and family members were often separated from one another by partitions and rooms, each with a designated function. In the new household, each person claimed his or her own private space and possessions, something unheard of in medieval times. The sectioning off of private space made each person that much more aware of his or her own individuality and autonomy. The notion of privacy—a concept without any ontological standing in the late medieval era—was fast becoming the hallmark of the new autonomous individual. Privacy meant the ability to exclude others and was a mark of the new priority given to the individual life as opposed to extended-family relations, which had reigned as the dominant social unit from the very beginning of human experience.
The radical change in living arrangements began inauspiciously with functional and architectural changes in the medieval manor house. The medieval manor house was more like a public house than the kind of private dwelling we’re familiar with today. At any given time, the house might be inhabited by dozens of relatives and servants, not to mention friends and acquaintances. The rooms themselves were large and undifferentiated. Relatives and guests often socialized, ate, and slept in the same room.
The cottages of the poor were little more than “squalid hovels.” It wasn’t uncommon for twenty or more family members to share a one-room cottage that barely exceeded twenty square yards. Three generations might share the same bed. People went a lifetime never really having a moment alone. In pre-Napoleonic Europe, more than three-quarters of the population lived under these kinds of horrible conditions.
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By the nineteenth century, however, at least for the well-to-do, the notion of privacy had gained hold. The manor houses were divided into private spaces, each with a particular function. There was now a parlor, a formal dining room, private bedroom chambers, storage rooms, and quarters for the servants. The privatization of space encouraged greater intimacy and self-reflection, feelings that were barely exercised in the public life of the late medieval household. Even the poor gained a modicum of privacy. Between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, more than half of all laborers’ homes had expanded to three or more rooms.
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The changes in the layout of the home paralleled changes in the notion of family life. The nuclear family is a relatively new convention. In medieval times, the idea of family was a much looser affair. While the conjugal bond provided a sense of affiliation, we need to remember that families were extended institutions and included grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, generally living together or close by. Even the idea of childhood was not yet developed. Children were perceived as little adults and were valued for their economic contribution to the household. Many were sent to other homes to apprentice at the age of seven or eight.
The growing sophistication and complexity of economic and social life in the early modern era required more abstract learning and specialized training of the young, which could only be passed on by formal educational training in the classroom. Schools, which in the medieval age were used almost entirely to train clerics, expanded to include more general education. Schools isolated youngsters from the adult world, resulting in their new classification as “children.” Parents assumed a new responsibility of educating their children and looking after their development. For the first time, observes historian Philippe Aries, “the family centered itself on the child.”
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By the nineteenth century, the modern private family had superceded the extended communal family of the medieval era.
The increasing separation and detachment of the individual from the collective life of the community began to find expression in changes in vocabulary. The word “I” began to show up more frequently in literature by the early eighteenth century, along with the prefix “self-.” “Self-love,” “self-pity,” and “self-knowledge” found their way into the popular lexicon. The autobiography became a new popular literary mode. Self-portraits became popular in art. Even more interesting, small personal mirrors, which were little used in the medieval era, were being mass-produced by the mid-sixteenth century. Giant wall mirrors became a popular part of the furnishings in bourgeois homes. Mirrors reflected the new sense of interest in the self. Historian Morris Berman reminds us that in the medieval period, people “were not terribly concerned with how they appeared in the view of others.”
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The increasing sense of self brought with it greater self-reflection and, not surprisingly, endless hours of solitary time before the mirror.
The new emphasis on the self and personal autonomy was particularly notable in the changing style in furniture. The chair was introduced around 1490 at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.
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Before that time, people sat on wooden benches that lined the walls or on three-legged stools, or they huddled together on cushions on the floor. The only chair in medieval palaces was the throne reserved for the sovereign, denoting his elevated status. Uniform series of chairs first came into vogue in France during the height of the Renaissance, reflecting the newly elevated status of the individual. The idea of the chair was truly revolutionary. It represented an emerging feeling among an incipient bourgeois class that each person was an autonomous and self-contained being, an island unto him-or herself. Historian John Lukacs observes that “the interior furniture of houses appeared together with the interior furniture of the mind.”
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It’s probably not unfair to say that with the widespread introduction of the chair in Europe, the autonomous individual of the modern era had indeed arrived.
The transformation from public to private life and the growing emphasis on the individual was very much in evidence in the bedchamber. Medieval sleeping arrangements were communal, just like every other aspect of social life. Landlords and their mistresses, relatives, friends, and even valets and chambermaids slept alongside one another in makeshift beds. Members of the same sex often shared the same bed. Michelangelo slept with his workmen, four to a bed.
The permanent bed wasn’t introduced until the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, four-poster beds with canopies were commonplace among the nobility and burgher class. Curtains were attached to the beds to provide some small bit of privacy. Still, it was often the case that a man and woman would be making love behind the curtains while relatives and friends were socializing just a few feet away. On wedding nights, relatives and guests of the newlyweds customarily accompanied them to their wedding bed to witness the consummation of the marriage. The following morning, the bridal couple was expected to show the stained sheets to other members of the household as proof of their union.
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Slowly, the practice of sleeping alone in a single bed behind closed doors became more common. The kind of indiscriminate bodily contact that was so frequent in the late medieval era became a source of embarrassment. Public exhibitions of lust and sexuality, so prominent a feature of the medieval era, became taboo in the better households. Sexual relations became increasingly a private act, committed behind closed doors.
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The bath, which had previously been a communal activity, was also privatized and individualized. Remember, public baths were common in villages across much of Central, Western, and Northern Europe in the late medieval era. The fifteenth-century Florentine writer Bracciolini was taken aback upon his first visit to a public bath in Baden, Switzerland. By that time, Renaissance Italy had already left communal life behind. Here is how he described the event:
Above the pools are galleries where the men sit watching and conversing. For everyone is allowed to go to other people’s baths, to contemplate, chat, gambol and unburden the mind, and they stay while the women enter, and leave the water, their full nakedness exposed to everyone’s view. No guard observes who enters, no gate prevents one from entering and there is no hint of lewdness. . . . The men encounter half-naked women while the women encounter naked men. . . . People often take meals in the water. . . . Husbands watched as their wives were touched by strangers and did not take offense, did not even pay attention, interpreting everything in the best light. . . . Every day they go to bathe three or four times, spending the greater part of the day singing, drinking, and dancing.
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