Going to Oberammergau

ON MAY 17, 1875 The Times published a notice headed “MEDIAEVALISM VULGARIZED.” In its entirety the paragraph reads:

The Oberammergau Passion Plays have a claimed origin not in the Middle Ages but in 1633, when the villagers are said to have vowed to perform them every ten years in thanksgiving for their preservation from the plague. The only religious play still to be permitted in the region, it underwent extensive revisions in the early nineteenth century. During a revival in interest in English mystery plays, Britons saw in the Oberammergau plays a relic of their own lost summer plays of the Middle Ages. The words “vulgarized” and “quaintness” in this paragraph suggest that the unnamed “correspondent” – probably The Times's authority on the plays Malcolm MacColl – follows the scholars of the English mystery plays in conceding that the plays were conceived and performed by ordinary people as “folk” performances, but that only the elite can truly appreciate them.

By the 1870s Britons were well informed about the Oberammergau passion plays, but this was not the case in 1841, when an article in the Christian Teacher described the writer's trek to see the plays and what he or she witnessed there. The title is pointedly medievalist: “On the Holy Plays or Mysteries of the Middle Ages, with an account of a Sacred Drama which was performed in the year 1840 at Oberammergau in Upper Bavaria.”