FOSTER-Projekt: Regeln und Realitäten: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung von Idealen, Lebensweisen und Pflichten in den Gemeinschaften der Franziskaner, Johanniter, Cölestiner sowie Zisterzienser und Zisterzienserinnen
Berg Oybin Klosterkirche, Teil der Ruine
Religious orders were among the defining elements of social and spiritual life in the Middle Ages. This makes it all the more important to examine the fundamental rules of these communities and to work out similarities, differences and order-specific characteristics through a comparative analysis. This task is being addressed as part of the FOSTER-funded project "Rules and Realities: A Comparative Study of Ideals, Lifestyles and Duties in the Franciscan, Johanniter, Cölestiner and Cistercian Communities".
To this end, the participants in the project are concentrating on five different communities whose fundamental rules are being examined: (1) the Cistercian male monastery of Grünhain, which will be examined as a social space in relation to other Cistercian monasteries. In addition, (2) the Cistercian nuns will be dealt with, whose institutional regulations will be subjected to a fundamental analysis. A contribution on the Order of St. John (3) focuses on its influence on the development of medieval hospitals. The interactions between the monetary ideas and the primacy of poverty of the Franciscan Order (4) and the tension between being turned away from the world and being close to worldly power within the Celestine Order (5) will also be part of the study. This will focus on five different communities which capture the breadth of medieval religious life and which will be published in a collective publication.
The results of the analysis will be published in an online publication on the academic blog "Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte" and at the same time a project bibliography will be compiled and published on the FOVOG website. These publications will be accompanied by a podcast in which the central themes of the study will be discussed in a dialogical format.
The project thus combines humanities research with modern forms of communication and makes an important contribution to understanding the respective medieval religious communities by analyzing the selected orders.