Rettenpacher Simon P.

Simon Rettenpacher, O.S.B. (also Rettenbacher; humanist pseudonym Mison Erythraeus), was a Benedictine monk, Neo-Latin poet, dramatist, historian, librarian, and academic teacher whose career was divided principally between Salzburg and the abbey of Kremsmünster. He was born at the Untergänsbrunnerhof in Aigen near Salzburg, the son of the farmer Rupert Rettenpacher and Barbara Grüberin, and was baptized in Salzburg Cathedral on 17 October 1634; the precise day of his birth is not securely documented. After the early deaths of his parents, he entered the Benedictine gymnasium attached to the University of Salzburg in 1648. In 1653 he was admitted to the Collegium Rupertinum, which enabled him to pursue philosophy and law at Salzburg. A period of study and travel in Italy in 1658–59 took him to Siena, Rome, and Padua. During his Roman sojourn he became acquainted with Leone Allacci, then custodian of the Vatican Library, and moved within learned circles associated with Cardinals Antonio and Francesco Barberini. His education thus combined the institutional humanism of Benedictine Salzburg with legal training, first-hand exposure to Italian scholarship, and an enduring interest in languages and books.

Rettenpacher entered the Benedictine abbey of Kremsmünster in 1660 and made his solemn profession on 2 February 1661. He subsequently returned to Salzburg for theological study, received priestly ordination in 1664, and served for a time as an assistant in the abbey library. A second Roman residence in 1666–67 was devoted particularly to Oriental languages, pursued in association with Allacci and the scholarly resources of Rome. On returning to Kremsmünster, Rettenpacher became director of the abbey gymnasium and assumed responsibilities in its library. From 1671 until 1675 he occupied the professorship of ethics and history at the Benedictine University of Salzburg. He also served as pater comicus, the official responsible for the university theatre, an office that joined pedagogy, public ceremonial, rhetoric, music, and dramatic composition. For the Salzburg stage he wrote three of his best-documented historical and mythological dramas: Demetrius (1672), Atys (1673), and Perseus (1674).

After his return to Kremsmünster, Rettenpacher resumed work as librarian, teacher, and theatrical director. The conjunction of an established school theatre, an ambitious Benedictine educational programme, and the technically elaborate stage presented to the abbey in 1676 provided an unusually favourable environment for his dramatic activity. For the ninth centenary of Kremsmünster in 1677 he composed Callirrhoes ac Theophobi amores, a large-scale dramatization of the abbey’s foundation legend. Prudentia victrix sive Ulysses was performed in 1680 in the presence of Emperor Leopold I and the empress, while the musical drama Iuventus followed in 1682. Rettenpacher also wrote the German play Frauen-Treu, oder Wie Herzog Welff aus Bayern durch Liebe seiner Frauen von grosser Gefahr errettet worden ist. Nine Latin plays were assembled in the folio Selecta dramata diversis temporibus conscripta et in scena recitata, printed at Salzburg in 1683 by the court and university printer Johann Baptist Mayr. The volume preserves works originally conceived for performance rather than merely private reading and constitutes the principal printed monument of seventeenth-century Benedictine drama in Salzburg and Kremsmünster. Rettenpacher’s dramaturgy draws upon classical history and mythology, humanist comedy, allegory, and the moral vocabulary of Neo-Stoic virtue. Political ambition, instability of fortune, the misuse of authority, and the destruction of rulers unable to govern their passions recur throughout the tragedies; comic and satirical works address failures of education, scholarship, and social discipline.

Rettenpacher’s activities extended well beyond the theatre. His Annales monasterii Cremifanensis in Austria Superiore, printed by Mayr in 1677 for the abbey’s centenary celebrations, combined monastic historiography with comparatively exacting attention to documentary evidence. The imposing illustrated folio, furnished with an engraved frontispiece and plates, belongs simultaneously to the traditions of Benedictine historical scholarship, institutional commemoration, and baroque festival publication. Although later historians corrected particular identifications among its medieval sources, the work marked a significant stage in the critical historiography of Kremsmünster and circulated beyond the abbey; a German translation appeared in three parts in 1793. Rettenpacher also produced sermons, ascetic and catechetical writings, translations, epigrams, odes, epodes, and satires. Under the pseudonym Mison Erythraeus he published Ludicra et satyrica at Salzburg in 1678, a collection containing youthful satirical treatments of contemporary learning and education. His lyric production, largely in Latin but including a smaller body of German verse, was immense. From the early 1680s he maintained what later scholarship has termed a poetic diary, eventually comprising more than six thousand poems. Horace supplied an especially important generic and metrical model, while comparisons with the Jesuit poet Jacob Balde illuminate Rettenpacher’s place within the Catholic Neo-Latin lyric tradition of the seventeenth century. His German poems are likewise important evidence for the persistence of Latin–vernacular bilingualism within the learned culture of Catholic southern Germany and Austria.

Rettenpacher’s bibliographical and scholarly interests were central rather than incidental to his intellectual life. His surviving correspondence repeatedly associates monastic vocation with literary labour, and his work in the Kremsmünster library included the acquisition and organization of scholarly books, among them works connected with his linguistic studies. His manuscript legacy, including two substantial collections of letters, remains in the abbey library. The letters, preserved from the 1650s into his later life, document his friendships with Benedictine scholars, his studies, institutional duties, literary projects, and increasingly difficult relations within Kremsmünster. They also reveal that epistolary composition itself formed part of his cultivated Neo-Latin practice.

In 1688 internal opposition to Abbot Erenbert Schrevogl produced a petition to the bishop of Passau. The surviving correspondence indicates that Rettenpacher was assigned, against his wishes, to obtain the signatures of monks serving in dependent parishes. When the initiative became known to the abbot and its principal instigators withdrew, Rettenpacher was left exposed to retaliation. On 11 October 1688 he departed Kremsmünster to assume pastoral responsibility for the small parish of Fischlham, residing at nearby Steinerkirchen because Fischlham possessed no suitable parsonage. He regarded this removal from the library, school, and theatre as an unjust exile, yet continued to write during his years in parish ministry, producing poetry, homiletic works, and devotional texts. He was permitted to return to Kremsmünster as an emeritus on 8 April 1706. He died there of a stroke during the night of 9–10 May 1706 and was buried in the abbey crypt.

Rettenpacher’s reputation rests upon the unusual breadth of a corpus situated at the intersection of monastic scholarship, school theatre, Neo-Latin poetry, historiography, and the history of libraries. Nineteenth-century readers recovered him chiefly as a Catholic Austrian counterpart to Horatian Neo-Latin poets; twentieth- and twenty-first-century research has more precisely examined his classical sources, dramaturgy, satirical writings, German verse, correspondence, and linguistic bilingualism. The cataloguing of his seventeenth-century editions and the modern recovery of his manuscripts have established him as a major witness to the learned and performative culture cultivated by the Benedictine institutions of Salzburg and Kremsmünster.