Daniela Tinková
Peregrin Stilwasser’s Spiritual Pilgrimage Through Enlightenment-Period Bohemia and Through His Own Destiny. A Fictional Travelogue in the Context of Social and Political Satire During Josephinism
The study focuses on a remarkable novel by prematurely deceased Prague preacher and publicist Augustin Zitte (1752-1785), Peregrin Stilwasser's Spiritual Pilgrimage Through Bohemia (Peregrin Stillwassers geistliche Reisen durch Böhmen. Oder: Kapitel übers Mönchswesen, und Beyträge zur Geschichte des Cälibats, der Taxa Stolae, wie auch der nöthigen Seel und Leibessorge. Samt allerley andern kuriosen und abentheuerlichen Pastoral und Liebsaffären, item hie und da ein paar Züge der geistlichen Leibeigenschaft, alleged place of publication Nimburg 1783), which was published at the author's own expense.
This satirical work, which is particularly critical of conditions in religious orders, describes three journeys of the young hero through central Bohemia. In a lively dialogue form, it depicts various types and attitudes of both religious and secular priests with which the young man, destined to enter a monastery, is confronted. The "journey" here represents both actual travelling through selected Central Bohemian localities and symbolic travelling among various attitudes, opinions and social environments. On another level, it is a journey through contemporary ecclesiastical vices: here we find basically all the practices criticised by the Josephinists: the debauched life of monks and priests, including greed, drunkenness, gluttony and lust, the "superstitious" character of folk piety and magic, the empty content of prayers, but also the abuse of the work of young chaplains. Last but not least, it is also a "journey" in the sense of personal maturation of the protagonist, whose life is affected not only by the gradual disillusionment with the life of the religious order and (Catholic) religion in general but also by love and his first erotic experience.
I first set the study in the contemporary context of changes in religious life (the dissolution of monasteries under Joseph II along with anti-monastic sentiment, relaxation of the publishing market and the "pamphlet war" for the Catholic Enlightenment). Finally, I introduce a few satirical works by Zitte's contemporaries who came from or spent some time in the Czech lands (F. K. Guolfinger von Steinsberg, Leopold Alois Hoffmann and Franz Xaver Huber in the former case, and Johann Friedel and Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht in the latter case) and elaborated the motif of travelling and journeying into an allegorical form of a fictional journey to a fairy-tale realm ruled by animals or moon-men. These dystopian stories, often published anonymously or under pseudonyms and in fictional places, challenged the Austrian political system and its social arrangements, and not infrequently also criticized some of the Joseph II's reforms - especially their authoritarian character, the rampant bureaucratic apparatus, or the utopian nature of the reforms, which in their consequences harm society and its members.
Keywords: Augustin Zitte - Franz Karl Guolfinger von Steinsberg - Josephinism - Enlightenment - literary satire - religious orders
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