Theatrum Gloriae

Zur (begrenzten) Karriere einer Metapher im frühneuzeitlichen Fürstenlob

Abstract

The focus of the article is the reception of the Theatrum-metaphor in the early modern panegyric looking at the ecclesiastic territories Mainz, Würzburg and Fulda in the centre of the Holy Roman Empire. After weak beginnings in a panegyric poem of the later humanistic poet Johannes Posthius addressed to the newly elected Würzburg Prince Bishop Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn in 1573, at around 1600 a clear visualisation was characteristic for the monuments to stage Prince Bishop Echter without using the term Theatrum – a Theatrum avant la lettre. The first example for an explicit use of Theatrum is Theatrum Gloriae Moguntinae, printed 1629 in Mainz. The jesuitic authors interpreted the title copper to the newly elected Archbishop Anselm Kasimir Wambold von Umstadt who could see himself surrounded by the bishops of his church province, and to the second audience, the reader, too. 85 years later, the jesuitic mourning print THEATRUM VIRTUTIS (1714) uses the Theatrum-metaphor, too, to place the deceased Fulda prince abbot Adalbert von Schleiffras in an emblematic cosmos of virtues which is staged in the Castrum Doloris. Why you find the Theatrum-metaphor so seldom in the many jesuitic praise poems honorating the election, inthronisation and mourning of catholic princes in the Holy Roman Empire, is a question yet to be solved – maybe a consequence of the prosaic inflation of the term in the contemporary literature organising knowledge.