Oddly I am getting a lot of primary-source milage out of old etiquette books these days in AskHistorians! But etiquette books, or courtesy books as they are sometimes called for these periods, are a great way to tackle this question, because a lot of them have a lot to say about the proper modes of social intercorſe and what one should and should not be talking about. However, they have two drawbacks: one, they are written from the literate to the literate, so they are only a good record for rich people; and two, they tend to focus on the BAD topics of conversation, and leave the right topics to your own process of deduction I suppose. But here are some things people had to say from these books:
- Il Galeteo, which is from an earlier period but would have still been highly influential through the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, is a gold mine for this sort of thing, and also hilarious. The author, writing in the form of a letter to a young man (a common literary convention for courtesy books), warns us against brownnosing, telling everyone in the vicinity you’re about to go take a dump, pulling letters out of your pocket to read while you are talking with someone (nothing new is there), punching people in the side to make sure they got the joke, commenting when other people eat too much or too little in your opinion, and bringing up inappropriate and depressing stuff at parties. There’s a lot more to be gleaned here, honestly Il Galeteo should be read in its entirely by anyone remotely interested in European culture from 1300 to today.
- Sir Francis Bacon has some thoughts on conversation in a few places in his essays, but here talks about inappropriate things to joke about: “religion, matters of state, great persons, any man's present business of importance, any case that deserveth pity [...]”
- From a later period, and a lot less gentle, Daniel Defoe unloads a long essay on us about how “Conversation has received a general taint and the disease is become a charm” and in particular warns against talking “atheistically” and committing “sodomy of the tongue”
- The Lady’s Preceptor (written by, naturally, a man) warns against telling stories of “fastidious length” and not to use “expressions that are obscure or bombast” (don’t use fancy words or slang)
- For women, the best conversational topic is apparently silence. Another man in a different book again advises there is no “greater indecency in conversation” for a woman than “excessive talkativeness”
Now, we must also think a bit sideways here, which is that if someone takes the time to print up a treatise on things he doesn’t like people talking about, that probably means… people were doing them! So people living around these book-writing stick-butts probably spent a lot of time talking about:
- Sex stuff
- Just general undefined swearing and taking the Lord’s name in vain
- Long winded and unfunny stories
- Gossip
- Laughing at their own jokes
- Arguing about religion, mentioning atheism
- Politics
- Bodily functions of all sorts
- Eating
- Inappropriate jokes
- Women just talk too much in general
On the positive note, from courtesy books we can infer that some proper and approved things to talk about would have been:
- General educational matters, books you have read, books you would like to read, art, history. These courtesy books hammer time and time again on the importance of being well-read to being a cool and classy person, so presumably you were supposed to demonstrate your literate classiness by talking about books
- Current events, newspapers existed at this time
- Music, events you have attended or would like to attend in that vein, if you played an instrument or sang
- Things that are happening in your life, birth, marriage, death, you saw a flipped over turtle in the road on Sunday, whatever
- Mutual acquaintances and the things that are happening in their lives
- Religion, if you are not arguing or taking the Lord’s name in vain (or anyone is an atheist I guess)
- Whatever interests the two or more people in a group find themselves sharing!
So nothing like our conversation today. :)