Workshop "Religious Orders as Communities in Themselves"

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

Unlike today, religious orders and their members were present and influential in the societies of pre-modern Europe. The German-Croatian DAAD project "Religious Orders and Societies in Interdependence. The examples of the Croatian historical countries and the Holy Roman Empire" aims to research the interplay between various religious orders and the respective societies in the Croatian historical countries and the Holy Roman Empire. It aims to examine in a comparative and interdisciplinary way how different orders identified themselves as distinct communities that differed from the societies surrounding them, how the surrounding societies nevertheless influenced the orders and, conversely, how the orders reshaped the societies surrounding them.

The first workshop of this project will deal with the orders as communities per se and aims to understand how the orders differentiated themselves from the surrounding society in theory and through certain practices. 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 the demarcation through architecture, vestments, specific symbols and rituals or liturgy, as well as 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 Croatian historical lands and in the Holy Roman Empire.