Acceso usuarios
Jesús Cruz
During the course of the nineteenth century about 300 books on civility, etiquette and good taste were published in Spain. Most of this literature was imported from other European countries - mainly France and England - and translated and adapted to the idiosyncrasies of the Spanish reader. Courtesy and etiquette books served to disseminate in Spain models of conduct prevalent in the western world. In their pages Spanish men and women could learn about the norms that they needed to follow in order to join the ranks of the dominant polite societies. In other words, courtesy books provide a portrait of the nineteenth-century ideal bourgeois, a model that upward-bound Spaniards strove to imitate. This article analyses the content of this literature and its role in the consolidation of nineteenth-century bourgeois Spain.
