The Priest, the Sexton, and the Weaver: A Flemish Dinner Play Performing Biblical Theology (c. 1539–1565)

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the anonymous dinner play entitled The Priest, the Sexton, and the Weaver (Prochiaen, Coster en Wever) . Notwithstanding its anti-ritualistic stance, the dinner play becomes in turn a ‘performance’ of the new religion and the conflict it brought about in the Low Countries, staged in the privacy of a rhetoricians’ banquet, which acquired for this reason the character of a secret Protestant conventicle. Surely, anti-clerical satire had already been a feature of late medieval rhetorician practice, but was enlarged/amplified in early modern Protestant plays, in order to justify the break with the Roman Church. This one-sided negative assessment of late medieval and early modern Catholicism, however, has been rightly questioned by modern historians. On the basis of the aforementioned sketch, it may be clear that the analysis the chapter presents of the dinner play is primarily a Church historical and theological one. Keywords:biblical theology; dinner play; religion; rhetorician plays; Roman Church