International research colloquium "Stars of historical research up close"

Internationally renowned historians, including Patrick Geary (Princeton), Jean-Claude Schmitt (Paris), Mikhail Boytsov (Moscow), Constant Mews (Melbourne), Volker Leppin (Yale), Bruce Brasington (Canyon/Texas), Claudia Zey (Zurich), Pavlina Rychterová (Vienna) and Unn Falkeid (Oslo), will speak on current topics in medieval history. You can download the schedule below. The lectures will be accessible via Zoom.

Childhood and Youth in the Middle Ages

In the proseminar Childhood and Youth in the Middle Ages, held by Mirko Breitenstein, contemporary concepts of childhood and youth as well as the corresponding realities of life are recorded and analyzed on the basis of various social spaces (monastery, noble court, town, village).

Imitation in the Middle Ages

The principle of imitation is not only innate to us as an anthropological constant, it also forms a cultural matrix, without the decoding of which medieval culture (like any other) cannot be understood. Kings acted like David or Alexander, bishops like Moses, Aaron and Peter, people did penance like Cain and Job, fasted like Elijah and Christ or died like Christ and Martin of Tours.
In our advanced seminar, we will extract and analyze the basic role models taken from Christianity, pagan antiquity, Germanic myths or Islam and examine their structural interdependence and social relevance for the functioning of the patchwork culture of the Middle Ages.

The World of the High Middle Ages

With its cultural transformation processes, the period between 1050 and 1250 is undoubtedly one of the most influential in European history. This period, in which the battles between the empire and the papacy seemed to unhinge the world, was a time of further development of the feudal system, the culture of chivalry, courtly minne, crusades, church reform and a great flourishing of Christian monasteries and orders. The rediscovery of conscience, the new emphasis on individuality and the establishment of the first parliaments paved the way for the modern era in terms of structural history. The lecture delves into this exciting and fascinating phase of the Middle Ages and presents the most important of these and other phenomena from a cultural studies perspective.
The lecture is accompanied by a tutorial in which the topics of the lecture can be reviewed and questions about the exam can be discussed.

Chronicles of the Middle Ages

An immense number of chronicle works have survived from the Middle Ages, in which the past and present are recorded, literarily edited and interpreted according to the intention and target audience. Together we will read well-known and lesser-known works - from the great world chronicles to chronicles of a genealogical nature to works of urban or monastic historiography - and gain insights into the ideas of the world, the origins of peoples and dynasties and, more generally, into the lifeworlds of the Middle Ages.

Beginning, progress, completion – discipline and 'self-optimisation' in the Middle Ages using the example of David of Augsburg's treatise "On the outer and inner man"

The dictate of constant improvement and increased efficiency has long since reached the individual in the modern age, as efforts at 'self-optimisation' have been in vogue for years. In earlier medieval times, the maxim of progress had an ambivalent to pejorative connotation; it was mainly used in relation to humans, who were seen as malleable and in need of education for the good.

The work "On the outer and inner man" by the Franciscan David of Augsburg († 1272) was a widely read text for the practical instruction of novices from the early 14th century at the latest. The treatise, which could be found in almost every monastery of the late Middle Ages, was a "bestseller" divided into three parts, which conveyed the basic behaviours of everyday monastic life through a graduated structure from the outside to the inside of the person. Through psychologically profound and partly emotion-based observations as well as physical and mental habit training, it had a comprehensive effect on the individual. With vivid descriptions, David therefore offers an insight into people's worries and hardships, but also into the cosmos of norms and ways of thinking of his time. Thanks to this elementary content, the text not only circulated among religious, but was also read far beyond that and appealed to people in different times and situations again and again. As a kind of 'handbook for personality formation', it influenced late medieval intellectual history and was even taken up again and again in modern times.

Having Rights and Being Right – Religious Statutes in the High and Late Middle Ages

Every cohabitation needs rules. This is just as true for student shared flats today as it was for a medieval monastery. While verbal agreements and understandings are sufficient for the moment, it is difficult to maintain them for a longer period of time with changing people involved. At a certain point, they have to be written down.
In this course we will look at the proper law of different religious communities. While the often well-known rules of religious orders such as the Rule of St. Benedict or the Rule of St. Augustine provide a basis for living together, statutes show the respective needs of the communities. How do these texts come about and what do they regulate? What differences are there between the communities? We will deal with these and other questions in this exercise.

© Laura-Marie Lang

Interview with Hikaru Itoh

Hikaru Itoh was a visiting researcher at the Research Center for Comparative History of Religious Orders (FOVOG) in Dresden in March 2024. In this short interview, he talks about his research at Tokyo Metropolitan University, his interest in German studies and the Japanese education system. The interview was conducted by Rebecca Hoppe.

© LIT

Ohnuki, Toshio/Melville, Gert/Akae, Yuichi/Takeda, Kazuhisa (Eds.): Pastoral Care and Monasticism in Latin Christianity and Japanese Buddhism (ca. 800–1650) (Vita Regularis – Ordnungen und Deutungen religiosen Lebens im Mittelalter. Abhandlungen, 84)

Monasticism has a special position in the history of pastoral care. It produced innovations in various aspects of pastoral care despite, or more precisely, because of its isolation in legal or social terms from the secular world. The thirteen papers contained in this volume will reveal that there was a great variety in the ways pastoral care continued to be practised by monasticism, depending on time, space, and the nature of each religious order. Adopting a comparative approach, their historical and geographical range of investigation is not limited to medieval Europe but expands to the Americas and even to Japan in the early Modern Age.
This volume bases on a conference held on 1 and 2 March 2019 at Okayama University, Japan, as part of the close collaboration between a Japanese research group on Christian/Buddhist religious movements and the Research Project „Monasteries in the High Middle Ages: Innovation Laboratories for European Life Designs and Regulatory Models“ of the Saxon and the Heidelberg Academies of Sciences and Humanities, as well as the Research Center for Comparative History of Religious Orders (FOVOG, Dresden).

© LIT

Hering, Kai (Hg.): Klosterleben in der Kritik. Geschichts- und literaturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf Herabwürdigungen des Religiosentums in Mittelalter und Reformationszeit (Vita Regularis – Ordnungen und Deutungen religiosen Lebens im Mittelalter. Abhandlungen, 83)

While verbal or symbolic disparagement of the secular clergy has already attracted the interest of medieval research, attacks against religious orders and communities - with the exception of hostile reactions to the mendicant orders - are still a marginal topic. Taking up this aspect, the present volume focuses on negative-critical perceptions and evaluations of monastic life, which manifested themselves in polemical invectives as well as in mocking poems or satirical depictions. By examining historical constellations of disparaging speech about religiosity, the studies aim to encourage a deeper examination of the discourses of the vita religiosa.

© Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Ardura, Bernard/Melville, Gert (eds.): Secundum evangelium Christi et vitam apostolicam. I Canonici Regolari dal Medioevo ai nostri giorni (Pontificio comitato di scienze storiche. Atti e documenti 67)

The idea of a monastic transformation of the clergy found decisive support as early as the 11th century, on the one hand among the regional nobility, and on the other hand throughout Europe, especially among many representatives of the episcopate and the pope, to whom many newly founded monasteries were entrusted. In the end, however, it was Pope Urban II who gave the young, weakly institutionalised movement of the Canons Regular a truly solid foundation. This fixed Canons Regular between the secular clerics on one side and the monks on the other, and at the same time secured them in this sort of unassailable and independent position.

© Schnell&Steiner

Melville, Gert/Sonntag, Jörg (Hrsg.): Mechanismen des Innovativen im klösterlichen Leben des hohen Mittelalters (Klöster als Innovationslabore, 12)

Anyone researching the sustainably new, i.e. looking for innovation that transcends system boundaries, can hardly avoid the monasteries of the 12th and 13th centuries in the Middle Ages. Consciously or by chance, monastic culture opened up areas of the first and unknown, in which experience had to be gained in order to handle the innovative. In the process, beacons of technical progress, a new approach to writing, a new type of statute law, regulated procedures or ritual solutions based on creative hybrid models emerged. This volume deliberately does not focus on the innovations themselves, which have already been examined several times. Instead, it examines the systemic contexts in which innovations functioned in monastic life, i.e. why they arose and how they were promoted, supported, inhibited or even destroyed.

© böhlau

Vogt-Spira, Gregor/Breitenstein, Mirko/Melville, Gert (Hg.): Freiheit (Europäische Grundbegriffe im Wandel: Verlangen nach Vollkommenheit, 003)

Freedom is a fundamental concept of European culture that is particularly successful. However, it is subject to a cultural imprint that is all too easily forgotten in the belief in the global triumph of freedom. A look at the history of the concept of freedom reveals this fundamental cultural imprint. The central idea of this volume is to analyze historical formations from antiquity to the present: a two-and-a-half-thousand-year history in which the discourse on freedom has been subject to considerable shifts. The interdisciplinary approach, which takes into account both the conceptual and the pragmatic side, seeks to overcome the usual divisions from which separate discursive traditions have developed - depending on whether general conditions of possibility, historical forms of realization or current forms of regulation of freedom are taken into consideration. The approach of the series always includes the 'view from the outside', for which the USA, in which freedom still forms a core of the self-image today, and the East Asian cultures of modernity stand here.

© Be&Be

Analecta Cisterciensia 72 (2022)

The "Analecta Cisterciensia" is the most renowned academic journal in the Cistercian Order. The 72nd edition of 2022 contains articles by Marcus Handke, Wolfgang Buchmüller OCist, Sr. M. Sandra Gelbe OCist, Marion Feise, Oliver Auge, Robert Harlaß, Katja Hillebrand, Andreas Kieseler, Elizabeth Freeman, Georg Schrott and others.

© Be&Be

Analecta Cisterciensia 73 (2023)

The 73rd edition of "Analecta Cisterciensia" of 2023 contains articles by Prof. P. Dr. Mag. Moses Hamm OCist, Prof. Abbot Dr. Pius Maurer OCist, P. Dr. Meinrad Tomann OCist, PD Dr. Mirko Breitenstein, PD Dr. Jörg Sonntag. Also included is a foreword on the history of Analecta Cisterciensia, two essays on the life of Fr. Ludwig Gottfried Schenker-Angerer and a reprint of individual articles by this man from the journal Sancta Crux of Heiligenkreuz Abbey.

© Thorbecke

Jörg Sonntag: Der spielende Gott des Mittelalters (Mittelalter-Forschungen 70)

This study is the first to examine the complex and powerful motif of the playing god in the cultural history of Latin-Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. Across time and space, it examines how and why God was also identified as a dancer, chess, card, dice or even tennis player and what implications resulted from this truly omnipresent playfulness for the lifeworlds of the Middle Ages. In doing so, the study uncovers the playing god not only as a hub of intra-societal communication cycles, but also a generally deeply rooted code of European concepts of God, which allows the structures of medieval culture to be further deciphered in a new way through play.

Jörg Sonntag

Playing with God. Games as Tools of Pastoral Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, in: T. Ohnuki / G. Melville u. a. (eds.), Pastoral Care and Monasticism in Latin Christianity and Japanese Buddhism (ca. 800-1650) (Vita regularis. Abhandlungen 84), Berlin 2024, pp. 123–136.

Vom Messgesang zum Würfelspiel. Spielende Klosterleute in der Sozialkritik des späten Mittelalters, in: K. Hering (Hg.), Klosterleben in der Kritik. Geschichts- und literaturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf Herabwürdigungen des Religiosentums in Mittelalter und Reformationszeit (Vita regularis. Abhandlungen 83), Berlin 2023, pp. 145–162.

Jenseits der Zeit? Konzepte zur Ritualisierung von Ewigkeit im monastischen Leben des 12. Jahrhunderts, in: Interfaces. A Journal of Medieval European Literatures 10 (2023), pp. 17–37: https://riviste.unimi.it/interfaces/article/view/20569/19870 

Marcus Handke

Together with Julia Becker: Einsam oder gemeinsam? Spannungsfelder innovativer Lebensexperimente (12./13. Jahrhundert), in: Mechanismen des Innovativen im klösterlichen Leben des hohen Mittelalters, ed. by G. Melville / J. Sonntag (Klöster als Innovationslabore 12), Regensburg 2023, pp. 111–140.

Der einsame Bernhard. Projektionsfläche eines Ideals innerhalb der Vita Prima Sancti Bernardi, in: Analecta Cisterciensia 72 (2022), pp. 9–42.

© K. Lassig

Academic commemoration Prof. Dr. Uwe Israel (May 30, 2024)

On June 3, 2023, our colleague Uwe Israel, Chair of Medieval History at the TUD Dresden University of Technology, passed away at the age of sixty. With this colloquium, we want to remember some of the stages of his professional life and work and thus remember together a highly esteemed, committed and productive historian.

© FOVOG

FOVOG on YouTube

On our YouTube channel you can find the recorded videos of the two "Monasteries in Modern Media" lecture series "Von bierbrauenden Mönchen und kriegerischen Nonnen – Klöster und Klerus in analogen und digitalen Spielen" [Of Beer-brewing Monks and Warring Nuns - Monasteries and Clergy in Analogue and Digital Games] from the summer semester 2023 and "Manga, Film and Instagram – Klöster und Klerus in medialer Vielfalt" [Manga, Film und Instagram – Monasteries and Clergy in Medial Diversity]  from the previous terms. Both lecture programmes are linked below.

Mirko Breitenstein, Director of FOVOG, and Andreas Handschuh, State Secretary, Saxon State Ministry for Science, Culture and Tourism © Ben Gierig

Free State of Saxony secures valuable scientific and cultural assets from St Marienthal Monastery

With financial support from the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung, the Free State of Saxony has acquired the historically significant library of St. Marienthal Monastery through the Saxon State and University Library in Dresden. Saxony was thus able to preserve this unique Saxon cultural heritage in its entirety, safeguard it for science and research and preserve it permanently for the public and future generations. This was preceded by long, intensive negotiations between the Free State and the monastery, during which a purchase price totalling EUR 5.5 million was agreed.

© Alina Schaarschmidt

Results of this year's school internship

From April 15 to April 26, two pupils completed their two-week school internship at FOVOG. They were able to gain an insight into the work of a historian by getting to grips with research work and getting to know the Saxon State and University Library (SLUB). The two interns also attended several different courses to gain an insight into everyday university life and the teaching activities of a historian. In the second week in particular, they devoted themselves to their respective internship project, which involved creating an interactive map on pilgrimages in the Middle Ages using the example of the knight Arnold von Harff and a story map on the architecture of Franciscan monasteries in the Brandenburg region in the Middle Ages.

Dresden Night of Museums 2024

Spuren der Armut – Franziskus von Assisi und seine Bewegung [Traces of poverty – Francis of Assisi and his movement] with Prof. Dr. Mirko Breitenstein

 Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister/Semperbau Dresden, meeting point: ticket office (basement)