Manners, civility and politeness in antique Malta

For the purposes of civility and polite manners, it was one major stroke of good fortune in geography’s lottery that Malta found Italy as its closest neighbour rather than Great Britain, its colonial owner for a 150 years. Civility, the art of pleasantness to others, got energised in Italy. Other countries eventually learned it too, some later than others, but always looking up to Italy as the unchallenged tutor of refined conduct.

Acquired good manners, gentility, in time also reached England, laboriously, but in his 1561 book The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio, Thomas Hoby could still plead for foreign works on polite deportment to be translated into English, “so that we alone in the world may not still be counted barbarous in our tongue as in time out of mind (immemorial) we have been in our manners”.

It is surely not a coincidence that the very first three books that attempted to teach the British how to behave civilly, were all translations from Italian authors: Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, 1528, translated by Hoby, Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo, 1558 (first English version, 1576), and Stefano Guazzo’s Civil Conversation, 1574 (rendered into English...