Workshop "Religious Orders as Communities in Themselves", Dresden, June 16–17, 2025

A workshop as part of the German-Croatian DAAD project "Religious Orders and Societies Entangled. The Examples of the Croatian Historical Lands and the Holy Roman Empire"

Religious Orders as Communities in Themselves - A Comparison between the Croatian Historical Lands and the Holy Roman Empire

Unlike today, religious orders and their members were not only present in the societies of pre-modern Europe, but also extremely influential. The German-Croatian DAAD project "Religious Orders and Societies Entangled. The Examples of the Croatian Historical Lands and the Holy Roman Empire" aims to explore the interplay between various religious orders and the respective societies in the historical Croatian territories and the Holy Roman Empire. It aims to conduct a comparative and interdisciplinary study of how various religious orders identified themselves as communities that differed from the societies surrounding them. At the same time, however, the mutual influence of orders and society will be examined.

The first workshop of this project will deal with the orders as communities and aims to better understand how the orders differentiated themselves conceptually, but also through certain practices, from the surrounding society. It will draw on Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia, which refers to a place that actually exists but has a utopian character, and apply it to monasteries. This workshop will analyze various aspects by which the orders differentiated themselves from their environment, such as architecture, clothing, specific symbols and rituals, liturgy and their reflection in writing and polemical literature. In addition, the question of regional differences and regional identities will be addressed, e.g. different architectures of monasteries of the same or similar orders in the historical territories of Croatia and the Holy Roman Empire.

You can find the program here