Peculiar Christians, Circumstantial Courtiers, and the Making of Conversation in Seventeenth-Century England

This essay looks at both spiritual and secular "conversation guides" published during the Restoration era in order to argue that a primarily discursive and contingent tradition of courtly conversation converged with a primarily immanent and embodied Christian usage of the word in late seventeenth-century England. It was this process of convergence and the refined version of conversation that emerged from it that made possible the polite, progressive Whig social agenda of the eighteenth century. / REPRESENTATIONS 111. Summer 2010 c The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 33-59. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/rep.2010.111.1.33.