FOSTER-Projekt: Regeln und Realitäten: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung von Idealen, Lebensweisen und Pflichten in den Gemeinschaften der Franziskaner, Johanniter, Cölestiner sowie Zisterzienser und Zisterzienserinnen
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Mirko Breitenstein
Members: Rebecca Hoppe, Marie Wogawa, Laura-Marie Lang, Alina Schaarschmidt, Philipp Marko
viewed from the left: Marie Wogawa, Laura-Marie Lang, Rebecca Hoppe, Alina Schaarschmidt, Philipp Marko
Religious orders were one of the defining elements of social and spiritual life in the Middle Ages. This makes it more important to examine the fundamental norms of these communities and to work out similarities, differences and order-specific characteristics through a comparative analysis. Therefore five students want to fulfill this task as part of the program Funds for Student Research der TU Dresden (FOSTER) within the project "Rules and Realities: A Comparative Study of Ideals, Lifestyles and Duties in the Franciscan, Knights Hospitaller, Celestine as well as Male and Female Cistercian Communities".
The project participants are concentrating on five different communities whose fundamental rules are being examined: Alina Schaarschmidt deals with the Cistercian male monastery Grünhain in eastern Saxony, which is analyzed as a social space in relation to other Cistercian monasteries. Rebecca Hoppe is dedicated to the ambivalent ideas of solitude of Cistercian women within normative texts. A contribution on the Order of St. John will be prepared by Laura-Marie Lang, who will focus on its influence on the development of medieval hospitals. Philipp Marko analyzes the interactions between monetary ideas and the Franciscan Order's ideal of poverty. At the same time, Marie Wogawa will examine the tense relationship between the Celestine Order's detachment from the world and its proximity to secular power. The results of the analyses will be published on the academic blog "Mittelalter. Interdisciplinary Research and History of Reception". 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 historical research with modern forms of communication and makes an important contribution to understanding the respective medieval communities by analyzing the selected orders.