Chapter 2 - “Georgius Jenatius, Engadino-Rhetus”: Mapping Identity among Region, Nation, and Language

Summary

When George Jenatsch was fourteen, he and his father left the mountains to bring him to school in Zurich, a regional metropolis and the center of the Swiss Reformed Church. In the registration book of the Schola Tigurina, the institute in Zurich for future Reformed pastors, Jenatsch signed his name as “Georgius Jenatius, Engadino-Rhetus.” These four words open up a whole series of puzzles that can advance our investigation into how Jenatsch moved through identities and crossed boundaries over the course of his life. The first two words are his name, of course, but translated into Latin, which was only one of the languages he used during his lifetime. The words “Engadino-Rhetus,” meanwhile, located Jenatsch in both physical and cultural space. The Engadine was his native soil: the valley where his family had originated and where he spent his youth, where a good part of his military career took place, and where he eventually struggled to bring some peace and cooperation among hostile religious factions. The Engadine also provided a base for the two great Bündner families, the Planta and the Salis, whose ambitions Jenatsch crossed and whose primacy he challenged. But by naming himself not just an Engadiner, but also “Rhetus,” a Rhaetian, young Jenatsch also placed himself in a larger political and historical frame. Rhetus was the hero who had supposedly lent his name to the ancient Roman province of Rhaetia, which Bündner historians of the sixteenth century firmly connected to their own political system, the Republic of the Three Leagues.