Lokale Religiosität im Theater. Die Verehrung des Heiligen Niklaus von Flüe im Sarner Bruderklausenspiel

The article examines the alleged duality of the piety of ‘the people’ on the one hand and the official religiousness of clerical elites on the other during the time of the Counter-Reformation in the Swiss Confederation. The study of a saint’s play, performed in 1601 in Sarnen, a village near Lucerne, shows that by performing this play, the rural population and the clerical elite united in stating their common belief and locally shaped opinions. The article investigates how the play enacts local religious traditions, for example by the use of a specific costume of a devil figure or the robe of Saint Niklaus von Flüe, or by staging a procession.