Threat Discourse and Coping in Christian Societies (1570–1980)

The project F 03 examines sermons and liturgical dramas from the fourteenth to seventeenth century and the communication of threats within them from an intercultural perspective that bridges geographical boundaries within Europe and the chronological break around 1500/1517. It focuses on three scenarios involving threat, analyzing them to determine the extent to which it is possible to recognize literary/textual, rhetorical/theatrical, and religious/social schemas used to construct threats and mobilize against them.

Research Methods:

During the era in question (i.e., the fourteenth to the seventeenth century), European societies communicated threats to their coexistence as the work of transcendent and immanent factors. From the perspective of contemporary worldviews, God and society were constantly interacting, which meant that every social threat was a challenge to the divine and vice versa. Medieval and early modern sermons and liturgical dramas were a widespread and effective method of communicating perceived threats. They were fully integrated as organizational structures with religious and social functions, and they were temporally located within daily life and traditional celebrations, surfacing again and again, sometimes more acutely, sometimes less, depending on circumstances. Regularity and occasional urgency are thus not divergent but rather complementary; periodic dramatization is intertwined with dramatic problem-solving. Threats reoccur but not always with the same intensity. This project draws on sources that perpetuate the knowledge of such recurrence and provide models for interpretation and mobilization against perceived threats. Their implementation, however, took the form of oral performances before an audience, and this results in their mobilization potential: sermons and liturgical plays were a medium for conveying potentially threatening scenarios to a broad audience with a strong claim to religious and social validity.

Three Threat Scenarios

The staging of threats sought to mobilize the audience’s emotions—against religious indifference, against the enemies of Christ, and against confessional foes—and to effect a reorientation of their lives at both the individual and societal level. In addition to its focused threat assessment, the project also investigates strategies of mobilization for a re-ordering of society that grew out of the specific context in which sermons and liturgical dramas were performed.

(1) The “eternal damnation at the Last Judgment” is the greatest threat of all, because it is an irreversible reaction to the deformation of the world. Apocalyptic rhetoric foresees the end of the world in order to mobilize a small minority for the ultimate re-ordering of the world. The emphasis on the judgment of the individual, on the other hand, calls individuals and societies to commit themselves to a new model of Christian community.

(2) In the “Jewish conspiracy,” the Jews’ “denial of the Messiah” was seen as an eminent threat to Christian order and the Christian claim to power. Passion plays regularly drew attention to this fact. Sermons, on the other hand, reacted more to acute situations like plague, war, or hunger by suggesting that these were somehow caused by the Jews. During the Reformation period, the relationship between apocalyptic rhetoric, the conversion of the Jews, and hostility towards the Jews was redefined. There was a strong element of mobilization within anti-Jewish polemics: pogroms reinforced the foundation of “the Self” by destroying “the Other.” Beyond this concrete aggression, they also highlighted the superiority of the Christian culture or pointed to the sinfulness of Christians as well: this was ultimately a re-ordering that shaped identities.

(3) “Confessional condemnation” was a similarly extreme source of threat, because God himself called believers to combat the teaching of false doctrine from within the Church. The corresponding notion of the Antichrist that prevailed in such discourses served to bring together the heretical with the Last Judgment. In the Reformation, confessional condemnation for heresy was not only an issue between the confessions but also within the respective groups, as divergent parties strove to impose their own visions for a distinct re-ordering of the Christian community.

The diverse expressions of piety in the late Middle Ages, and even more so the early modern confessions, varied significantly in how they appraised threats and mobilized to deflect them. The project primarily analyzes sermons from Germany and Italy as well as German and French liturgical dramas.

The project as a whole draws on the perspectives developed by scholars of religion, theater, and rhetoric to address religious/social, staged/theatrical, and linguistic/textual schemata in terms of the construction of threats and mobilization against them. Because the communication of perceived threats in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries included prominent transcendent and immanent elements, it is an object of study for church history. Because such communication is part of a constant exchange of the written and staged word, it is an object of study for literary scholars. The interdisciplinary nature of this project makes it unique within the landscape of German-language scholarship.