One of the most striking metaphors for the formation of modern Western society was proposed by the classic sociologist Norbert Elias: he wrote about the “taming” of the nobility by the royal court - an institution that formed a complex system of social codification, including a certain manner of behavior. Thanks to the training that modern European man was subjected to, good manners subsequently began to be perceived as something natural. Elias's metaphor comes up whenever we talk about texts that record normative patterns of behavior, be they textbooks of good manners or books on home economics: they all represent an attempt to tame everyday life, to unify and systematize often unrelated practices. The book includes works devoted to various methods of verbal and visual taming of reality, the gap between the rules of good manners and their practical application, problems of translation and adaptation of foreign codes, genre features of normative literature, etc. The authors of the collection are leading Russian researchers of history and culture: O. Vainstein, M. Velizhev, M. Mayofis, V. Milchina, M. Neklyudova and others.