Monasteries are institutions which, by setting themselves apart from society, are dedicated to their own kind of intensified cultivation of piety. The very term "monastery" says it all. In contrast to oriental monasticism, which elevated personal asceticism to an ideal, most occidental orders strive to have an impact on their social environment. They want to make their solid foundation fruitful for their fellow human beings. With this in mind, they bring corresponding impulses into the surrounding society. They make complementary contributions to non-parish pastoral care. Of course, these were subject to constant change over the two millennia of Western monasticism. They have been adapted to the respective circumstances of the time and range from the itinerant monasticism of the early Middle Ages to the electronically supported digital pastoral care of our present day.
Libri et Litterae
In the pre-modern era of the early modern period, this participation took place primarily through the use of the expanded possibilities of writing. An important sector of the emerging book culture was dedicated to religious literature, which in turn came to a considerable extent from the monasteries. From the very beginning, the library was an indispensable component of every monastery. Monks and, to a lesser extent, nuns were active as authors. The large religious houses set up their own monastery printing works, where the works were published in-house. In the 18th century, especially in Upper Germany, the monastery libraries became the sophisticated centres of book culture, which were increasingly made available to the public. With books and libraries, the religious orders made a significant contribution to progress in the sciences and thus to Western civilisation. The highest-ranking book culture was an important contribution of the monastic world to the shaping of European cultural history in the early modern period.
Books were intended to have a long-term effect - and undoubtedly achieved it. A second means of monastic communication beyond the monastery walls had a more short-term impact.
These were the letters. With the help of letters, a more personal connection to the outside world could be established with much less effort. The exchange was necessarily indirect. The effective barrier of the monastery wall always remained between the writer and the recipient of a letter. The medium of the letter thus created at least a semi-personal form of communication. In addition to private exchanges, this at least made it possible to address problems of a more general nature.
The book and letter were based on very different writing situations. The book is characterised by detailed description, while the letter is geared towards brevity. With the desired objectivity and the genre's inherent subjectivity, both literary genres tend in very different directions. The book requires an elaborate and long-term process of creation, whereas the letter is designed for a short period of time and spontaneity. Because of the incomparably greater effort involved, the book is characterised by greater formality, whereas the letter may be very situational and personal.
With these two ways of writing, the monasteries of the pre-modern era became involved in social discourse. These tools enabled them to participate in public life, which they wanted to help shape and develop despite their self-imposed exclusivity. The later Munich Jesuit poet Jeremias Drexel (1581-1638), who was active in Dillingen at the time, explicitly mentions this unifying fundamental objective in a letter to his confrere Father Matthäus Rader dated 28 December 1606.
Here he formulates the rhetorical question in the context of existential considerations: et quid quaeso est, quod in vita retineat, nisi libri et litterae: in his view, books and letters are the decisive media for the participation of religious in social dialogue. In the value system of the monastic world, these were the most important tools that enabled them to successfully participate in the cultural life of the early modern period, which was determined by the written word.
Correspondence as historical sources
The age of humanism gave the individual an elevated position in society. This elevation gave the epoch its name. The letter became a very important medium of extended cultivated exchange between the empowered individuals. Culturally aware personalities at least entered into written contact with other people in their milieu in order to exchange information across distances. This applied to personal, business and political communication. Intergovernmental communication also increasingly switched to written messages. Letters from decision-makers marked the high points in the diplomatic relationships that were gradually emerging.
Fourthly, the letter became increasingly important for cultural and scientific discourse from the time of humanism onwards. Humanism promoted scholarly exchange across national borders on the basis of the unifying Latin language; this is why the humanist letters are historical testimonies with particular significance. In the context of confessionalisation, they often dealt with questions of religious and ecclesiastical life. Letters also played a decisive role in the process of confessionalisation. In the context of these changing social structures, the quantity of letters increased significantly from the 16th century onwards, reaching a real peak in the 18th century. The emerging postal system created the practical conditions for this.
The letters were of particular importance for the Jesuit order. In contrast to the medieval orders, the Societas Jesu was a very hierarchically structured organisation with an international and intercontinental reach. Its centralised leadership was only possible through writing; the letter became a decisive, indeed indispensable, tool for this. In this context, the genre was further developed from a means of information to a stylised artistic letter. Ovid's heroic letters, in particular, provided a stylised model that was readily adopted by well-known representatives of the order. The Jesuit order also recognised the letter's central position in written culture as a means of religious leadership.
In line with the growing importance of correspondence for the development of private and public life, cultural-historical research turned its attention to this type of source. The letters became an important object of editorial scholarship and literary-historical interpretation. The Protestant side took particularly effective initiatives. The letter was recognised as an essential means of expressing and fighting for the fundamental attitudes of the Reformation. The extensive corpora of letters by the leading reformers Martin Luther, Johannes Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli were published early on in comprehensive book series. Following in the footsteps of these pioneers was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whose boundless correspondence is still being worked on today. The editorial endeavours were extended to include letters from the wider circle: Philipp Melanchthon, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Thomas Münzer, Andreas Osiander, Martin Bucer, Johannes Reuchlin. The scholarly analysis of German epistolary culture in the early modern period has an unmistakable preponderance on the Protestant side.
This means that the research situation does not properly reflect the tradition. No less extensive collections of letters from the Catholic world are still stored in the archives and libraries of the Upper German region. Here too, the large monasteries in particular produced extensive correspondence. At most, they are only consulted and considered in individual cases. A comprehensive analysis has not yet been carried out. From Bavaria, the best known are the very extensive commercium Pollinganum of the learned Augustinian canons from Polling Abbey or the letter bequests of the Benedictines of St Emmeram in Regensburg, Tegernsee and Ottobeuren.
The systematic cataloguing and analysis of these almost unmanageable library holdings has never been tackled or even considered in terms of editing. There are many reasons for this lack of research. A worthwhile field of work lies largely untapped here. This refers above all to regional history. Non-university institutions are required to do more of this hard work than university teaching staff and students. Austria is leading the way with the cataloguing of the Pez brothers' correspondence from the Benedictine Abbey of Melk. In Italy, the letters of the Jesuit priest Martino Martini can be used as a model after the correspondence of Galileo Galilei or Antonio Muratori. In Bavaria, the most important current endeavour is the work of the Commission for Bavarian Regional History on the correspondence of the Jesuit Father Matthäus Rader. It continues the commendable older series of humanist letters of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences with the letters of Konrad Celtis, Konrad Peutinger, Johannes Cuspinian and Willibald Pirckheimer. The first two volumes of the edition project were published in 1995 and 2009. They are presented in more detail below.
The epistolary of Fr Matthäus Rader
The epistolary works of the Jesuit priest Matthäus Rader (1561-1634), who was born in the South Tyrolean monastery town of San Candido and worked in the colleges of Augsburg and Munich, have been preserved in six collective codices. Today they are stored in the Bavarian State Library and the Jesuit Archives in Munich. Around 2000 letters are preserved in them. Outside of this core collection, other letters can only be found very sporadically. The contents and form of the collection are characterised in outline.
The most striking feature of this epistolary is its one-sidedness. The letters to Rader clearly outnumber the counter-letters from Rader. The latter make up no more than four per cent of the total. The unusual one-sidedness can be explained on the one hand by the tradition. The letters to Rader were collected very carefully by the addressee. His letters to others have to be traced in the recipients' records, which are naturally very disparate. In addition, the headstrong Matthäus Rader was a very calculating letter writer who deliberately used his rare replies as a means of distancing and discipline. As a result of these conditions, the letters from the partners to Rader are predominantly available. The other side remains largely silent.
A second feature is the striking number of correspondents. According to current knowledge, there are 322 in total, with no fewer than 92 correspondents in the introductory volume of the edition alone. The arithmetical average in the opening volume is 3.3 numbers per writer. This is characterised by a small number or even individual letters from numerous writers. Larger blocks of letters can only be seen in exceptional cases. On the one hand, this results in a striking inhomogeneity and diversity of the content addressed. On the other hand, this peculiarity results in a wide thematic range.
The circle of letter writers can be structured. The students occupy the most important position. Rader was a professor of humanities and rhetoric at the Jesuit College of St Salvator in Augsburg. After completing their education there, the students kept in touch with their esteemed teacher through the medium of letters. This applies above all to the three most important students, the respected literary figures Georg Stengel, Jeremias Drexel and Jacob Bidermann. Furthermore, several names stand out that have a good reputation in the cultural history of Bavaria: the songwriter Petrus Frank, the playwright Kaspar Rhey, the theologians Jakob Gretser and Jakob Reihing, the historian Jakob Keller.
Secondly, however, the letter writers also included people who had nothing to do with Swabia and Bavaria, but were located in other regions. Rader used the medium of the letter to maintain contact with other regions and countries in Europe. The Jesuit College in Augsburg became an important communication centre from which threads ran to many other European cities. Among the places where letters addressed to Matthäus Rader were sent were Brixen, Fribourg, Graz, St. Gallen, Lucerne and Vienna in Upper Germany; Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Milan, Mantua, Padua, Rome and Venice in Italy; Lille, Nantes, Reims, Tournai and Madrid in the Romance West; Antwerp, Brussels, Leuven and Luxembourg in the North; and Prague, Warsaw and Vilnius in the East.
The letter writers even include some of the greats of European cultural history: Antonio Possevino, Caesar Baronius, Nicolas Trigantius, Justus Lipsius, Kaspar Schoppe, Jacques Sirmond. Communication threads from many European countries came together at the Augsburg College of St Salvator. The college was a remarkable hub in a very wide-meshed communication network. The focus was clearly on the Catholic world of southern Europe. Letters were largely transmitted via the channels of the order's administration. It had created an efficient information network that could also be used for this purpose. However, the radius of action by no means ended at the borders of the denominations, but extended well into the Protestant and Reformed world. Occasionally, names belonging to the new denominations also appear among the correspondents.
One particularly notable name is that of the Dutch scholar Justus Lipsius, who moved unsteadily between the religious groups. It was precisely this indecisive manoeuvring between the fronts that prompted Rader to cover up the traces of these connections in his immediate environment. There is no evidence of the Lipsius correspondence in the Rader estate in Munich; it is only known from the recipient's correspondence at the Belgian University of Leuven. Matthäus Rader evidently put aside the relevant letters in order to blur these contacts.
Several highlights of the correspondence lead into the world of politics. Isolated letters prove the Jesuit priest's direct connection to the Wittelsbach ducal court in Munich.
Maximilian I became aware of the special abilities of the Jesuit professor in Augsburg at an early stage and decided to win him over. He therefore arranged for him to be transferred to Munich in order to utilise him for court services. The young Munich College thus grew into a function that would later be transferred to the Academy of Sciences: as a central institution for dealing with particularly important scientific issues. In this way, P. Matthäus Rader moved into an influential advisory role, which was performed outside the regular state administration and was essentially realised through letters.
Overall, the unusually comprehensive Rader epistolary is characterised by a remarkable wealth of information. Even the introductory volume of the edition provides a meaningful insight into the wide-ranging cosmos of life of a Jesuit college that was by no means of the first rank. The College of St Salvator in Augsburg took a sophisticated part in the cultural life of the era in its entirety, with the theological sciences, literature and pedagogy standing out as focal points. But the emerging natural sciences are also within sight. The very disparate endeavours were arched over and held together by the unconditional commitment to God and the Church: Omnia ad maiorem Dei gloriam!
The correspondence with Marcus Welser
The stock
The Raderepistolarium is made up of many individual blocks. Each of these actually deserves separate consideration in order to describe its exact location and significance. This requires a great deal of specialised knowledge. One example is the complex relating to the playwright Jacob Bidermann. The 34 individual numbers run through the entire Augsburg period and are of particular significance in terms of the history of transmission because they are the only autographs of this important man of letters. Otherwise, his oeuvre is only known from non-autograph documents and the early prints. Bidermann's letters document the always very intimate relationship between the teacher and his pupil, who engaged in a lifelong, fruitful professional exchange. They are among the gems of the Epistolarium.
Of particular importance within the Rader
epistolarium to the correspondence with the Augsburg patrician Marcus Welser (1558-1614). With 325 numbers, the complex of Welser letters represents the largest single block within the entire corpus; they make up 15 per cent. The respected late humanist Welser was one of Rader's most notable correspondents. Above all, a dialogue-like correspondence is evident here. Welser received 188 letters from Rader; they make up 80 per cent of all known Rader letters. On the other hand, Rader received 137 letters from Welser. In this case, therefore, the Jesuit was exceptionally the more active letter writer.
Compared to other partners, he was much more sparing with his answers. The correspondence spans the years 1597 to 1614 and provides an unusually detailed insight into the relationship between the Jesuit monastic scholar and the respected town clerk in the imperial city of Augsburg. Two social spheres collided here: the monastic world of the Jesuit and the bourgeois city world of the high-ranking patrician. The correspondence partners did not meet on an equal footing. The Jesuit priest always maintained an unmistakable respectful distance from the town clerk, who was held in high esteem as Augustanus Apollo. He himself characterised this in the image of teacher and pupil.
Of course, this unusually lively inner-city correspondence raises the question of its purpose. Matthäus Rader belonged to the Augsburg College of St Salvator until September 1612, so he lived in the immediate vicinity of the Welser city palace, in the Welserhaus. Obviously, the college wall was a real dividing line that effectively stood in the way of personal contact. They had a lot to say to each other. This was hardly possible in a personal exchange, but required the written form. The letters had to be delivered by messengers. Almost all of them are in the originals, which both sides carefully collected. After Welser's death, Rader received back his letters addressed to the patrician and thus reunited the two blocks of documents. They are still in this order today.
The content
Rader and Welser belonged to roughly the same generation, but completely different milieus. What did the Jesuit churchman and the leading member of the city patriciate have to say to each other? What were the main content blocks?
On the one hand, the letters deal with questions of science; they primarily concern the disciplines of history, literature and philology. This group of subjects brought the two scholars together. They primarily dealt with problems from these fields. Rader asked Welser for support in clarifying questions about the editions of the texts of the classical authors Curtius Rufus and Martial that he was currently working on; the humanist patrician had important things to contribute.
It is also about the history of the local saint Afra. Rader turned his attention to this subject from 1600 onwards and endeavoured to close the many gaps in knowledge that still existed. With great success, he brought this central topic for the city, whose local relevance brought the two scholars even closer together, to the Jesuit stage. All the stages of the Jesuit drama, from the clarification of the historical foundations and the creation of the textbook to the performance and the reaction of the town's bourgeoisie, are discussed. Thanks to the accompanying letters, the Afra play is the best documented Jesuit drama ever.
However, these concrete work projects also repeatedly drew attention to a fundamental problem: the debate about the appropriate writing style. Which authorities should the use of the Latin language be primarily orientated towards? Did the ancient rhetor Cicero set the decisive pattern or would it be better to follow the leading contemporary authority, the Fleming Justus Lipsius. Ciceronianism or Lipsianism? That was the key question of the European philological dispute of the time.
The most important project on which the two writers worked together was the large-scale project of the Bavaria sancta et pia. Although Welser died in the early stages of the undertaking, he was still actively involved in its creation, planning and early realisation. He was particularly involved in the important presentation of the opening volume of the series. The title was the subject of intense discussions. The design of the cover image in particular was the result of joint deliberations. The decisive basic idea, the presentation of a map of Bavaria in front of the Mother of God with the child by the Archangel Michael assisted by four angels, goes back to an idea of Welser's and was modelled on his Sancti Augustani.
Similarly, much thought was given to the title of the book: Should the terms Bavaria and Bavaria be used here or the popular antiqueising word Boier, which was much discussed at the time? The two were certainly not associated with identical content. Bavari and Bavaria were associated more with present-day Bavaria, while Boii and Boicus focussed on the old and territorially much more extensive ancestral land of the Bavarians. The terminology contained different political concepts. In the end, the pragmatist Welser prevailed.
As he entered the second decade, more and more questions of Bavarian history came to the fore, which Rader was commissioned by Duke Maximilian I to deal with in 1612. Both were now working on the same major topic on behalf of the sovereign. Welser had stopped working on the unresolvable question of the possible descent of the Wittelsbachs from Charlemagne. Rader circumvented the difficulty by beginning his account with the dukes of the Wittelsbach dynasty from 1180 onwards. The two high-ranking experts discussed the basic problem in letters and came to the joint conclusion: Non liquet!
The dispute could not be resolved on the basis of the available sources. For this reason, neither Marcus Welser nor Matthäus Rader were able to present the complete account of the history of his territory that Maximilian I had hoped for. Rader's activities in the field of courtly panegyric, for which he made his literary expertise available on several occasions, also belong to this circle. He drafted funeral orations and inscription texts. Texts were discussed, improved and finalised in letters.
In addition to these problems of current literature and historical research, the correspondence provides an insight into the coexistence of the denominations in the parity-based imperial city of Augsburg. Many letters document the successful co-operation between scholars of different denominations on scientific projects. They supported each other with advice, expert opinions and information, especially by providing the necessary books, regardless of the religious divisions. Welser acted as a liaison, bringing the Jesuit's concerns to the attention of urban society and, on the other hand, conveying their questions and requests to the college.
Overall, the picture that emerges is of a community of scholars who came together at the level of humanistic scholarship and placed this above the requirements of the denomination. Admittedly, Rader and Welser belonged to the same religion, Catholicism. Together, they both sought to co-operate with those of other faiths. The relationship was certainly not without problems, but it was certainly characterised by mutual respect and recognition of their achievements. The different milieus worked together successfully on the unifying platform of the humanist educational canon.
The correspondence is a widely scholarly correspondence. It covers the entire breadth of the academic sector. Occasionally, new paths are also taken. This applies above all to the field of historical research, which tried out innovative approaches in an endeavour to substantiate ecclesiastical statements. In this sense, several basic historical sciences are being taken a remarkable step further. This applies to palaeography, diplomatics, philology, numismatics, chronology and metrology. For example, the production of paper in antiquity or the construction and dimensions of the pyramids are dealt with in detail.
The history of technology is an important topic that the pragmatist Welser in particular addressed time and again. His discussions did not even stop at the problems of astronomy and how to deal with them using the new instrument of the telescope. In the letters, many topics of the scientific endeavour of the era are discussed in all their breadth and with innovative approaches. Rader distinguished himself - also with his letters - as an important representative of counter-reformatory Byzantine studies and a pioneer of Egyptology.
The private sphere is almost completely hidden in the letters. Only very occasional marginal references to the correspondents' personal relationship appear in almost hidden places. They prove that the two, who held each other in high esteem in their private lives, only very rarely met in person and were thus able to really get to know each other. In these cases, meeting places in the city or in the garden of the Welser family palace were arranged. On the other hand, the patrician scholar was invited to the theatre performances at the Jesuit College, which created an effective public forum.
On these various occasions, scientific and literary questions could also be discussed in direct dialogue. However, the decisive forum for this was the exchange of letters, which was essentially a scholarly correspondence. Here, ideas and suggestions were discussed which definitely represent a remarkable contribution to the further development of the study of the past into a historical science. The fundamental endeavour to document the sources and the relentless search for historical truth were already formulating basic demands at that time, which have formed the core of historical research activities ever since.
The mould
The generally sophisticated content is matched by the form of the letters. The Raderepistolarium contains many literary and carefully formulated artistic letters. This group includes above all the letters from Rader's students to their teacher. The students always endeavoured to apply what they had learned and thus demonstrate their skills to their teacher.
Rader's correspondence with Welser did not fulfil this requirement. It is based on a different writing situation than the other parts of the source block. Accordingly, it is more a matter of everyday letters in simpler forms without any literary pretensions. They merely serve to provide information about certain facts.
Welser also did not use the sophisticated generic term litterae for these letters; he spoke several times, almost pejoratively, only of schedae (= sheet of paper). For this reason, the Welser block is not actually indicative of the source material in formal terms. These schedae also use the Latin language with respectful formality, but do without any stylisation. They get straight to the point without a lengthy introduction and end without the usual respectful concluding formulae, often puffed up with versified declarations of benevolence.
Compared with most screaming
These letters are characterised by their brevity, with a very condensed address and often even no date. This is because the writer could assume that his letter was placed on his partner's desk on the same day. The omission of the date makes it difficult to determine the chronological location. The sequence of the dialogue can often only be deduced from the content. Most of the letters are autographs written by the author's own hand, which are quite neatly designed and brief, but lack any ornamentation: they are not letters of art, but rather everyday letters.
This characterisation applies to Rader's time in Augsburg. When Duke Maximilian I enforced the transfer to the Munich College at St Michael's, the letters were given a different appearance (illustration on previous page). They now became more detailed and conformed more to the rules of epistolography with a full address and the usual closing formulae. The increased distance required the usual components for delivery. The main content of the last letters is the illness of his partner, which ultimately led to his death and in which the Jesuit took a lively interest.
The meaning
The Welser complex within the Raderepistolarium is a valuable contemporary document with great significance for the intellectual and cultural situation in Augsburg, which was at the zenith of its historical development at the time. The ensuing Thirty Years' War soon put an end to this heyday. Crucial to this context is the observation that the special life situation of the Jesuit priest resulted in an unusual degree of writing about everyday business, which took the form of letters. Due to the high density of evidence, the correspondence between Rader and Welser appears to be a real stroke of luck in the history of European science in the early modern period. Nowhere else do we get such a realistic insight into the everyday lives of two creative scholars.
This wealth of sources also provides an insight into the reality of social life. It shows how the inner life of the parity-based imperial city was determined by different norms than in the denominationally closed territorial states in the neighbourhood. People were forced to adopt an early form of tolerance, to which even the Societas Jesu contributed. The letters to be considered here are evidence of the serious and effective endeavours to help shape social life at a social focal point on the eve of one of the great catastrophes in European history. The correspondence block is a significant document of the cultural conditions in the imperial city of Augsburg with a future-orientated direction.
The China Initiative 1616/17
From the epistolary of Fr Matthäus Rader, a second small group of letters that shed light on a very unusual circumstance should be selected for further clarification. They are preserved in the archives of the Jesuit Order in Munich. In 1616/17, Duke Maximilian and his wife Elisabeth sent three letters to the Chinese imperial court in Beijing, in which they requested the establishment of intensive contact between the imperial court there and the ducal court in Munich. The timing of the initiative in 1616 and 1617 is significant, as it was preceded by the completion of the construction of the new residence, with which the ducal court gained royal prestige in the competition for the ranking of residences.
It is clear from the associated correspondence that Father Rader was involved in this matter. Of course, the process belongs in the context of the East Asia mission, which was essentially supported by the Jesuit order. The decisive personality was Father Nicolas Trigault (lat. Trigantius), who, having returned to Europe in 1616, endeavoured to gain the support of the European princes for the Order's actions. The main organiser's point of contact in Munich was the friar Father Matthäus Rader. He arranged for the missionary's letter of invitation to be sent to the Duke and was commissioned by the Duke to draft the reply letter to the Emperor (see previous page).
The letter he submitted is available. The salutation paid the emperor every conceivable homage. The translation of the original, written in standard Latin, reads: "To the greatest and most powerful monarch of the Empire of China, the supreme emperor, the king of kings, Maximilian, the great Duke of Bavaria, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, offers peace, prosperity, happiness, victory and many years of life". After this Intitulatio and Salutatio, the author came to the point and expressed the wish "to conclude an alliance and a community of friendship and trade with Your Magnificent Majesty". An accompanying explanatory letter expresses the hope of winning the monarch over to Christianity. In these endeavours, the Fathers of the Society of Jesus in particular were to be given preferential treatment. The accompanying letter from Duchess Elisabeth refers in particular to the mediation services of Mary, the Mother of God, which are certainly helpful.
The three letters are accompanied by gifts in kind and books, including a Bible. In the spirit of consolidating the principles of knowledge policy, the power of the printed word alone was relied upon: Propagatio fidei per scientiam! The Chinese letters were of course designed with far more care than the Welser letters presented here. The mission was sent on 1 September 1617. The head of the China mission, Fr Trigantius, took the consignment with him on his return journey to East Asia. In this case, too, the transfer naturally took place on the railway lines of the Order's administration.
It is certain that the Jesuit Matthäus Rader was involved in this spectacular action. Because of the general international experience inherent in the order, but especially because of his literary and stylistic skills, he was called upon for this highly politically sensitive task with intercontinental reach. He made a significant contribution to setting the remarkable campaign in motion. The Societas Jesu was the most likely organisation to have the necessary skills due to its continent-spanning missionary activities and high standard of education. The court's cultural policy was targeted at this point. The Munich Jesuit College at St Michael's grew into a leading role in scientific policy, which was to be taken over by the Electoral Academy of Sciences in Munich in the following century.
It would of course be worth knowing what happened on the Chinese side: How was the initiative received? How did the imperial court respond? How did the initiative develop? Are the courtly gifts still recognisable in China today? We don't know any of this. Only one thing is certain: Matthäus Rader, a Jesuit priest with experience in this sector, intervened in international politics with letters that he conceived.
Room concepts
In conclusion, the discussions will be linked to a fundamental theoretical question of the research discourse on regional history. It endeavours to concretise the ideas of space: What concept of space, what concepts of space underlie the source segment under discussion? To what extent were the monasteries and the correspondence they maintained effective in shaping space? The very diverse, inhomogeneous source material of Fr Matthäus Rader's scholarly letters certainly does not allow for any clear answers. The different horizons of influence force us to differentiate between the order, the monastery and the writer himself.
The China initiative discussed in conclusion leads into the context of the church's missionary movement. It is globally orientated. The letters belonging here focussed on the continents known at the time and set themselves the goal of bringing all people to the Christian religion. The letter was the only means of communication available at the time to tackle the very serious task of missionising the globe.
Letters were not only used to guide and instruct the employees in this new and demanding task, which had to be accomplished over unfamiliar distances. Letters were also addressed directly to the other side in order to win them over to one's own concerns by addressing them directly. The missionary mandate of the Catholic Church set an intercontinental and intercultural dialogue in motion, which was primarily carried out by the ecclesiastical orders involved, above all the Societas Jesu, through correspondence. The Rader Epistolary provides a particularly striking example of this.
However, the majority of the letters focussed on the immediate surroundings. The Jesuit order was founded as a reaction to the Reformation and saw its main task as the defence of the old, Roman faith on the European continent. Letters were also used as a decisive tool for its realisation. The Rader correspondence is a significant example of this. The scope of the correspondence that came together in the Augsburg College at St Salvator was mainly continental. It has a clear focus on the Old Believer south and centre of Europe.
However, individual outliers reached beyond the emerging confessional boundaries into the area of the Reformation. The reason for this was the educational interest of Renaissance humanism, which transcended confessional boundaries. The late humanist Matthäus Rader also professed to be part of the educational elite of this era and maintained scholarly correspondence for this purpose, which he did not consider to be in line with his religious aims, at least in the case of Justus Lipsius. This block of correspondence points to a disagreement between the Jesuit's religious and educational goals. The majority of Rader's letters refer to this central and southern European environment.
However, the global and continental dimensions of Rader's epistolary work should not obscure the innermost core of the Jesuit scholar's personal scientific endeavours. In his literary activities from the 17th century onwards, he always focussed on one country in particular: This was the Duchy or, in the later years, the Electorate of Bavaria. In doing so, he followed a political conception of space that was determined by Maximilian I. The sovereign of Bavaria became his sovereign and decisive mentor at the latest when he moved to the Munich College of St Michael. As such, he provided the decisive framework for all cultural activities in his neighbourhood.
The area under his rule was also a precisely demarcated cultural area, which received its decisive signature through the vigorously enforced principle of exclusive catholicity. This made it an essentially closed confessional area. Maximilian I championed this concept with the greatest vigour. From this confessionally characterised area of rule and culture, effective impulses emanated into the surrounding area within the framework of confessional politics and missionary movements. Despite its continental and thoroughly universal dimension, for Matthäus Rader the country of origin always remained decisive: Bavaria.
The basic aim of Rader's entire scholarly activity, and thus also of the correspondence presented here, was to demonstrate the unique vitality of the close connection between state and church that was realised here. The Duchy of Bavaria seemed to him to be the outstanding example of this inseparable symbiosis that was to be striven for as an ideal. Where state and church co-operated to create such exemplary conditions for the development of Christianity, the latter was able to flourish in an exemplary manner and produce so many outstanding representatives.
This was the basic idea of spatial politics that underpins Rader's literary oeuvre. He developed it in breadth in his main literary work: the Bavaria sancta. Its introductory volume was published in 1615.
It is explained in the introductory preface with the reader in mind: "When you see the front of the book marked with the title Bavaria sancta, you will easily recognise, according to your high insight, that the name has arisen from the subject matter. For if you look around in all parts of Bavaria, you will hardly find a place where you will not come across shining traces of holiness and religiosity: towns, markets, villages, fields, forests, mountains and hills breathe and show the Catholic and ancient religion in Bavaria. Everything is filled with holy houses, imposing monasteries, new colleges, sublime shrines. (...) A large part of the Bavarian land is covered by the sacred, so that it would be truly tedious to go into details: the whole country seems to be only religion and a single, common sanctuary of the people. (...) But all this adds like a superfluity to the necessity of the name Bavaria sancta. Rather, the saints themselves gave me the title."
In these programmatic sentences, the author has summarised his ideas on the salvation-historical destiny and historical development of Bavaria. This basic idea of the area under discussion as a landscape blessed and sanctified by God is the guiding principle of Bavaria sancta et pia, the cultural and political foundation of Maximilian I's era. In the Epistolarium, the Jesuit priest Matthäus Rader provides numerous individual examples that illustrate and underpin his overall concept. The basic idea of the Bavaria sancta forms the basis on whose defining foundation more expansive spatial concepts are then built up in a pyramid-shaped arrangement in individual points and take effect.
