This collection explores the concept of civility in the early modern period. It addresses a range of writings in English and Scots - among them, conduct manuals, colonial tracts, diaries, letters, dialogues, poetry, drama, chronicles - by English, Welsh and Scots men and women in and about the Atlantic archipelago. It explores the many meanings of civility in the early modern period; it recovers some of the lost associations of civility as well as the complex use of the adjectives 'civil' and 'barbarous' in cultural and colonial encounters.

SHARON ACHINSTEIN Lecturer in English, University of Oxford, Fellow of St Edmund Hall, UK DERMOT CAVANAGH Senior Lecturer in English, University of Northumbria, UK KATE CHEDGZOY Professor of Renaissance Studies, University of Newcastle, UK ANDREW HADFIELD Professor of English, University of Sussex, UK THOMAS HEALY Professor of Renaissance Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK HELEN MOORE Lecturer in English, University of Oxford, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, UK DAVID NORBROOK Merton Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford, UK MARKKU PELTONEN Professor of General History, University of Helsinki NEIL RHODES Professor of English Literature and Cultural History, University of St Andrews, UK CATHY SHRANK Lecturer in English, University of Aberdeen, UK ROBERT WHITE Professor of English, Communications and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia