News and upcoming events

On 16.02.2023 at 7pm, FOVOG Director Mirko Breitenstein will give a digital lecture as part of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister programme entitled "Spuren der Armut. Franziskus von Assisi und seine Bewegung" (Traces of Poverty. Francis of Assisi and his movement). The lecture will be held in German.

A new research project concerns itself with patterns and strategies of social order in the Central Middle Ages. The formation of groups and the attribution of belonging to a group will be investigated in regard to the example of the lay brothers in the Cistercian Order.

Starting in May, Dr. Daniela Bianca Hoffmann will work on her own DFG project on holy Monk-Bishops at FOVOG, using vitae of Benedictine, Carthusian, and Cistercian bishops to investigate which models of reconciling monasticism and episcopacy were developed.

The Akademienprogramm is Germany's largest long-term research programme in the humanities & social sciences. This month, the project "Monasteries in the High Middle Ages" is presented on the BMBF page as Project of the Month.

Since October, we have been collecting and examining pictorial representations of monks, nuns and monasteries on Instagram and Twitter under @MonasticMedia.

The first meeting on #MonasteriesInModernMedia took place on 28.09.2022 via Zoom. Under the premise of bringing together those who are interested in the representation and presence of monasteries in modern media, 13 interested people came together.

Dr. Ekaterina Novokhatko will be working on her own project, funded by Maria Reiche postdoctoral Fellowship, for the next two years. She will investigate the rise of new devotional practices aimed at spiritual perfection that emerged from the 10th to the 12th centuries in the Trans-Pyrenean region.

From 28.08. - 20.11.2022, the Museum Abtei Liesborn will host the exhibition "Monk don't get angry. Fighting nuns, drinking brothers and mysterious monasteries in modern games".

After #KloesterImKino comes #MonasteriesInModernMedia - who is interested in the representation of monasteries in the narrower or broader sense? Films, digital or analogue games, literature, comics etc. – we would like to shed light on the presence of our research subject in the modern age.