ABSTRACT
Throughout Germany, monasticism had been one of the earliest targets of the Reformation, monks, nuns and friars among the movement’s earliest supporters as well as among its fiercest critics. As we have seen, the Upper Palatinate was no exception and the extinction of the religious and their houses was there an accompaniment to the implantation of both Evangelical and Reformed faiths. The return of regular clergy was, therefore, equally telling as a sign of the Catholic restoration. To the latter the religious moreover made an active contribution, the nature and importance of which varied according to the means and distinctive charism of their orders and congregations. The regulars included the pre-Reformation orders of monks and mendicants but also the new orders of the Counter Reformation, such as the Jesuits and Capuchins. Not unjustifiably, local scholarship has tended to regard the activity of the Society of Jesus as most instrumental to the recatholicisation, yet, lest we succumb to the Jesuits’ own triumphalism, we must consider their impact not in isolation, but in relation to the efforts and initiatives of the other orders, of the diocesan clergy, of the state and of the lay faithful.
