‘Forget Me Not’: Catholic Passion Meditation in Later Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Bavaria

Abstract

Many meditations and prayers on the passion were published by Bavarian presses at the end of the sixteenth century into the seventeenth. This article examines Jakob Feucht’s popular Christian Pilgrimage (first printed in 1574), situating it in relation to Feucht’s homiletic and apologetic publications, on one side, and to the broader flood of printed Catholic passion meditations, on the other. This broader flood is represented by the publishing career of Adam Walasser. I show that Feucht and Walasser, two widely published but little studied figures in post-Tridentine German Catholicism, aimed to use passion meditation to make distinctly Catholic Christians through a conjunction of inward, bodily, and communal practice; meditation was to deepen the Catholic selfhood of those who had been instructed by catechesis and preserved within the bounds of the Catholic church by apologetic. For Feucht and Walasser, the transformation of Catholics’ perception of self, society, time, and space through passion meditation was the only sure defense against the scourge of Protestantism.

Department(s)

Language, Cultures and Religions

Document Type

Article

DOI

10.1080/14622459.2025.2574281

Keywords

Catholic reformation, Catholic spirituality, Christian spirituality, counter-reformation, early modern Catholicism, Passion meditation

Publication Date

1-1-2025

Journal Title

Reformation and Renaissance Review

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