ABSTRACT
What does Everyman have to say about early modern conscience? This chapter examines the books of spiritual and material reckoning, and the divine, legal, and community judgements that constitute the protagonist Everyman’s conscience. It engages with patristic, early modern, and modern theories about the Book of Life, the Book of Conscience, and Moses’ tablets, and argues that Everyman juggles religious critique and orthodoxy, secular and religious morality, and identities as a play and as a book to reflect an early sixteenth-century world in which certainty and uncertainty are equally common experiences. The chapter demonstrates that the conscience which emerges in Everyman is protean and playful in its approach to knowledge and truth.
