Conduct books are a genre of books that attempt to educate the reader on social norms. As a genre, they began in the mid-to-late Middle Ages, although antecedents such as The Maxims of Ptahhotep (ca. 2350 BC) are among the earliest surviving works. Conduct books remained popular through the 18th century, although they gradually declined with the advent of the novel.
Famous quotes containing the words conduct and/or book:
“... the conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the operations of its own reason ...”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)
“We really learn only from those books that we cannot judge. The author of a book that we were able to judge would have to learn from us.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
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