“And What Could I Say Before Thee My Lord” ”

During the past decades, both in Hungarian and international research there has been growing interest in the “practical” and emotional literature of the Early Modern Period, including sermons, catechisms, community and private songs, meditations, books of comfort and counseling. A process has started to “emancipate” these text types (in terms of poetry, rhetoric, grammar and genre theory, or even with anthropology and literature sociology aspects), and place them back into the area of “literature” from where they had been exiled for long.

This is justified by the fact that these texts deeply influenced the thinking, the language use and the life conduct of the communities that were organized in the 16-17^th centuries mainly on the basis of religion and theology. Already Arnold Ipolyi called the attention to that the prayer book “is the sole reading for many”, and that after the Bible and the Catechism, these were the texts that “influenced most deeply the religious ethics of the people”. Typography history also confirms this statement, as the publishing of a large amount of affordable and small size books for community and private devotion was a sure and profitable business for the printing press owner, and the small number of remained copies reveals that they were frequently used by the customers, mostly in their mother tongue.

We present an example of this type of text and print: Heavenly Conversations by Pál Keresztúri Bíró. The dialogue between God and the devote believer weeping for his sins was published first in 1645, and then was reprinted 11 times during the 200 years that followed. Dénes Dienes, in his work about 18^th century Protestant piety in Hungary, [„Whatever I have learnt of my Lord Jesus Christ…”] says that in the 18^th century, “in addition to Praxis Pietatis, Heavenly Conversations was the read that probably most inspired the evolution of the devotional genre.