ABSTRACT
The Athenian Society provided the most comprehensive and individualistic guide to the conduct of human relationships available in print during the 1690s. This they achieved through the selective deployment of existing genres of literature, providing historical context, maxims, and precedents for each individual case.1 In short, they undertook a practice known as ‘casuistry’, a word which today sometimes has negative connotations, meaning ‘the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to moral questions: sophistry’.2 The manner in which the Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury chose to adopt the term in its subtitle indicates that this was not necessarily a pejorative epithet in the 1690s. First deployed by Catholic theologians to provide guidance upon Christian conduct, casuistry merely meant the bringing to bear of all relevant evidence in cases of moral and doctrinal confusion through a process of philosophical inquiry.3 This chapter considers how the idea of casuistry was appropriated by the Athenians as a highly practical method for dealing with personal anxieties. What started as a theological tool, associated especially with the methodical instruction of sixteenth-century Jesuits, wound up over a century later in Dunton’s periodical as a form of popular philosophy, transmitted via the practical exercises of nonconformist Protestant divines.
