Kirjahaku

The passion play at Oberammergau in Bavaria is one of the oldest theatrical spectacles in the world, with a history of regular performance that dates back to 1634. By the dawn of the twentieth century, each season drew hundreds of thousands of spectators from Europe, North America, and beyond. Thomas Cook's first package tourists rubbed shoulders with luminaries ranging from Henry Ford to Rabindranath Tagore and Sylvia Pankhurst to Franz Liszt. This book provides a new account of Oberammergau's surprising rise from local curiosity to global celebrity that weaves its development into the course of European and transnational history. Beginning in 1770, when the play's survival was threatened by a government ban, the book traces Oberammergau's story across the next century and a half, ending with the Nazi government's sponsorship of the tercentenary season in 1934. Combining close analysis of the community's archives and an analysis of the kaleidoscopic cultural and intellectual resonances of the play in Europe and North America, the book shows how the passion play's success hinged on the way its performers channelled the turbulence of modern European history and the shifting fascinations of their international audiences during the long nineteenth century. Not simply a religious relic serving devout spectators a dose of Catholic kitsch, the Oberammergau passion evolved in close connection with shifts in European culture. As the village transformed into an international destination, a diverse and growing crowd of artists, writers, actors, journalists, politicians, musicians, tourists, and pilgrims from across Europe and America took their experiences at Oberammergau back home to intervene in pressing debates of the time. Admirers used Oberammergau to think about unity in a divided Germany, the role of theatre in society, and the waning of religious belief; critics saw an example of commercialisation, cultural decline, and prejudice. This book shows that to explain the extraordinary prominence of Oberammergau in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American culture, we need to understand the vast array of meanings that viewers drew from the play's content and survival, and recognise that these extended far beyond the religious.

The Gospel According to Renan provides a new and holistic interpretation of one of the non-fiction sensations of the nineteenth century: Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus (Vie de Jésus). Published in 1863, Renan's book aroused enormous controversy through its claim to be a historically accurate biography of Jesus. While Life of Jesus provoked the ire of the Catholic Church in hundreds of sermons and pamphlets, it also sold hundreds of thousands of copies, making a fortune for its author and his publisher. Based on research into a huge range of print and manuscript sources, The Gospel According to Renan demonstrates how Renan's work intervened in a remarkable range of debates in nineteenth-century French cultural life. These went far beyond questions of religion, from the role of individuals in history to the meaning and significance of 'race'. Through an engaging reconstruction of Renan's intellectual formation, Priest shows how Renan's ideas grew out of the context of Parisian intellectual life after his loss of faith in the 1840s. Going beyond a traditional intellectual history, Priest uses a wide range of new manuscript sources, many of which have never been examined by modern historians, in order to reconstruct the ways that ordinary French men and women engaged with one of the great religious debates of their age. By tracing the legacy of Life of Jesus into the early years of the twentieth century, Priest finally shows how Renan's work found new political meaning in the heated debates over secularisation that divided French society in the young Third Republic.