The swiftly expanding field of historical (im)politeness research can enlarge our comprehension of interpersonal aspects of language use in a wider sense. This paper focuses on main key notions from a somewhat ‘non-historical’ viewpoint and occasionally exemplifies them by employing modern data The overlapping goals of historical (im)politeness research are: the description and comparative analysis of (im)politeness in historical contexts; accounting for changes in politeness; and the development or modification of theories and frameworks for historical politeness. All of these goals are concerned with relativity and the diachronic ‘reconstruction work’ implied by it. Section 2 of this paper reviews previous research on historical politeness and section 3 proposes the main concepts of the field; by exploring both theoretical and data-linked topics, this section explains the significant connection between past and present in terms of politeness. Finally, Section 4 will succinctly contemplate the principal arguments of the paper, and suggest areas for future research.