ANNICK PATERNOSTER Politeness and Style in The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi, 1840), An Italian Novel by Alessandro Manzoni 1. Introduction 1 1.1. The messiness of context Richard Watts, in a programme of work culminating in his 2003 book, has brought about a paradigm shift in politeness research with his view that politeness theory, (im)politeness2, should be based on lay perceptions of everyday politeness, (im)politeness1. The need to focus on (im)politeness- 1 has an interesting by-product: Watts has paid at- tention to the history of politeness manuals in Europe between the 16 th and the 19 th century, which, I suppose, is still an unusual step in the pragmatics of politeness. Watts dedicates most of the second chapter of his Politeness (2003: 27-46) to the history of etiquette, because it demonstrates the ongoing discursive struggle about the meaning of the term ‘politeness’. He shows how conduct manuals link politeness to a class effort (of courtiers, country gentry and later, bourgeois) to dis- tinguish its members from the ‘have-nots’, and how such manuals were used, especially in Victorian England, as a means of excluding the lower social ranks by presenting politeness as this mysterious, in- nate linguistic superiority. As Watts is suggesting, from a methodo- logical point of view, it seems worthwhile to make more use of the behavioural and rhetorical treatises of a given period as a strong inter- 1 I am very grateful to Claudia Caffi for her suggestions on an early draft of this chapter. I would also like to thank the editors of this volume and my anony- mous referees for their valuable comments.