Recent Studies in Early Modern Conscience

This essay covers scholarship of conscience in early modern England, with a focus on literary representations and their contexts. Conscience is treated most often in modern writing as a concept, with particular if waning relevance in religion and politics. Yet many early modern thinkers classified conscience as a vital faculty of the mind or soul, which enabled a person to know with someone, whether God, another human being, the self (reflexively), or some combination of all these. It thus functioned at a nexus of relationships that this essay studies in terms of casuistry, gender, history, law, religion, and—most intricately—literature. While surveying all these early modern English contexts influenced by conscience, this essay focuses on literary representations because they reveal the most refined insights on the varied discordant understandings of it. The continuing richness of scholarship on this concept in early modern England suggests its enduring vitality in several contentious areas, even as its etymological off-shoot “consciousness” sustains some of the modern discussions that in early modern times revolved around “conscience” itself. [J.H.]