ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the anxieties of authors and providing insights into the most salienttopoirunning through conduct books and considers the responses and reception these publications elicited from their readers. In the absence of consistent evidence about the reactions of the primary addressees, girls, and of those who might have accompanied them through the reading, mothers and governesses. It enrolls the assistance of readers whose testimonies have survived until the present day, namely, journalists who gave accounts of new publications in the press of the period. Conduct books do not escape the fate shared by most books published during the early modern period: a chronic lack of detailed information about their actual readership. Because the public of conduct books remains elusive, the promising recourse to find reactions to their publication lies in the periodic press of the time, which grew at a tremendous rate during the eighteenth century. The literary-philosophical periodicals spanned the whole ideological spectrum, from those endorsing traditional Christian values to those accepting of innovative ideas, at least within the confines of what censorship allowed.
