Becker's richly allusive essay in social and cultural history traces the emergence of a new civil society in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy and its later exportation to England. This new society was characterized by measure and control, by a separation of private from public concerns, by self-cultivation and self-conscious role playing, and by an inward and personal, rather than outward and social, orientation. The contours of this new social paradigm are revealed in Becker's careful examination of particular aspects of Tuscan culture and society during this period and their translation to England some two centuries later.