ABSTRACT
On the evening of 2 September 1693, the students of the college of the Society of Jesus at Amberg presented to their town’s burghers a three-act drama entitled The Palatinate Deformed by Heresy, Informed by Bavaria and Reformed by Faith.1 Two nights later the performance was repeated and the stage once more resonated with the steps and voices of dozens of boys, among them the precious scions of the local elite. As torches flickered, machinery creaked, instruments sounded, the chorus sang and the allegorical figures of the Palatinate, Bavaria, Reason, Conscience, Heresy and Faith carried forward the action, the parents took in the spectacle, some intently following the mannered Latin of the Jesuit wordsmiths and others doubtless stealing furtive glances at the vernacular plot synopses in their printed programmes (Figure I.1). As they did so, they may have reflected on the subject of the unfolding drama with mixed emotions. Touching the identity of its audience to the core, the play had as its theme the demise of the Protestant Reformation and a triumphant Catholic restoration in the Upper Palatinate, the south-German principality of which Amberg was the capital. This recatholicisation had begun with the invasion and annexation of the territory by Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria in 1621. Seventy-two years on, the Society of Jesus could survey the land and confidently judge its population to be firmly, and apparently definitively, Catholic. Whilst some of the audience will have shared the Jesuits’ epinician spirit, the arrows of nostalgia launched by the performance may have struck others more painfully, resuscitating memories of troubled family histories, grating accommodations, edgy compromises, shameful betrayals and spiritual trauma.
