Need for Manners. Like clothing, housing, and food, the development of early-modern manners was linked to defining and maintaining social hierarchies. The German sociologist Norbert Elias argued that the early modern era was a period of change and cultural instability. The discovery of the New World unsettled formerly firm notions of geography, the Copernican Revolution obliterated old cosmologies, and the Reformation shattered the unity of Catholicism. Feudalism, as a political and economic system, was giving way to absolutism and capitalism, which, for much of the period, were not fully developed themselves. In a society undergoing such reorganization, recomposing all its hierarchies, the consolidation of an increasingly complicated system of manners, reinforced through public display and by shaming and ostracizing nonconformists, rendered clear for all the boundaries and limits of social relations. Etiquette thus evolved rapidly between 1500 and 1800 because it was a means for society, in an...