The crisis of confidence and transformation of speech ethics in the early modern European society

Abstract

The article is devoted to exploring of a little-studied aspect of the spiritual and moral crisis that the society the West went through in the beginning of the Modern era. The author analyzes the factors сausing the decay of the Medieval atmosphere of trust and its representations in the moral philosophy, theatre, and fiction of 16th-17th centuries. At the same time the central subject of the research is the principle of adjustment to circumstances forming a very influential ideological stance that directed creation of the new ethical pattern in that transitory period.