Chapter 7 - Civic Liberties and Community Compassion

Summary

Clarinda Calma and Jolanta Rzegocka demonstrate how the experience of compassion shaped communities in early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by looking at the realm of theatre and normative poetics taught in the Jesuit schools of Poland-Lithuania. They argue that the Jesuit school theatre, a key institution in the Catholic Reformation movement, was one of the venues where the multi-denominational, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic public sphere of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was debated. Analysing the sermons of Piotr Skarga, rector of the Jesuit Academy in Wilno, alongside dramatic theory and playbills from Jesuit school theatres, they demonstrate that Jesuit theatre, homiletics and poetic theory became spaces where mercy, compassion and tolerance were continually questioned, debated and negotiated in the shifting context of the contemporary political reality.