Author: Francis Elsender

The Puritantical context of Arthur Dent

The first text we are staging as part of Early Modern Dialogues in Performance is an example of an early modern religious dialogue, one of the most widespread forms of the dialogue genre in the period. Religious publishing in general was big business in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and religious dialogues in particular were used for didactic purposes (teaching a particular point of doctrine), devotional purposes (fostering personal piety and religious practices such as prayer), apologetic purposes (arguing for the truth of a particular viewpoint), and polemical purposes (attacking the theology of opposing groups). _[1]

From a literary point of view, some of these dialogues are more interesting than others. Some feature characters who personify abstract entities such as Death or the Church or are simply mouthpieces spouting arguments or Bible verses with little characterisation. [2] Others, however, combine their religious message with a degree of realism that shows us something of everyday life in the early modern period. [3]

Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven falls into this second category. It is a religious dialogue that begins when two neighbours on their way to sell a cow (Asunetus the ‘ignorant man’ and Antilegon the ‘caviller’) decide to take a break to discuss matters of religion with the minister Theologus and the ‘honest man’ Philagathus. What follows is a discussion that ranges over the signs of salvation and damnation in a way that sheds light on social issues such as alehouse culture and the ‘racking of rents’ by unscrupulous landlords, as well as the competing religious views of the zealously ‘godly’ of Puritan persuasion, the comfortably conformist, and the sophisticated sceptic. It thus provides material of interest not only for readers primarily interested in religion, but also for those interested in other aspects of the social and economic history of the period.