Charterhouse Mariefred
The Mariefred Charterhouse , also known as the Gripsholm Charterhouse , was a monastery of the Carthusian Order in what is now Mariefred , Strängnäs municipality in Sweden . The Charterhouse is the namesake of the place, which was called Gripsholm before it was founded . Mariefred was the only Carthusian monastery in Scandinavia and one of the last founding monasteries in Sweden before the Reformation .
history
The Charterhouse Pax Mariae was founded in 1493 by Jakob Ulvsson (around 1430–1521), Archbishop of Uppsala . Sten Sture the Elder (around 1440–1503), imperial administrator (Swedish: riksföreståndare) of Sweden , equipped the monastery with goods in Gripsholm, Södermanland and other land in the area.
The monastery was built on the Gripsholmbucht of Lake Mälaren on a hill near today 's Gripsholm Castle . The monastery church was consecrated on February 15, 1504. The first monks came from the Charterhouse Marienehe near Rostock .
A printing press was set up in the monastery as early as 1498 . The only work known from this workshop today is a devotional book for the veneration of the rosary . The book was circulated across Europe and had a powerful impact on religious life in the late Middle Ages.
The existence of the Mariefred monastery was short-lived. In 1526 it was secularized as one of the first monasteries by Gustav I. Wasa (1496–1560) . In December 1525 he claimed the monastery property from the inheritance of Sten Sture. He had given the land to the monastery on the condition that it should revert to his heir, Gustav Wasa, if the monastery was dissolved. This claim was confirmed to him by the Swedish Imperial Council in January 1526.
building
After the Carthusian monastery was dissolved, Gustav Wasa had the monastery complex demolished and the material used for the expansion of Gripsholm Castle. In the 1620s, the Mariefred village church was built on the foundations of the monastery church.
During excavations in the south of the church, a cellar and some wall remains were discovered. A small collection of stones from the monastery complex is exhibited in the church tower. There are no visible remains of the monastery.
Literary adaptation
August Strindberg describes in his collection of novels " Svenska öden och äfventyr " (1882-1891), German: " Swedish fates and adventures " (1911), in a fictional story the creation of an altarpiece for the newly built monastery.
literature
- Carl-Johan Clemedson: Kartusianklostret i Mariefred vid Gripsholm , Verlag Södermanlands Museum, Nyköping 1989, ISBN 91-85066-97-4
- Marijan Zadnikar (Ed.): The Carthusians - The Order of the Silent Monks , Verlag Wienand, Cologne 1983, ISBN 3-87909-105-6
- Tore Nyberg: Mariefred / Gripsholm , in: Monasticon Cartusiense , ed. by Gerhard Schlegel, James Hogg, Volume 2, Salzburg 2004, 779–785.
Web links
- Literature on the Mariefred Charterhouse in the catalog of the German National Library
- Mariefred on the Strängnäs municipality website
Coordinates: 59 ° 15 ′ 31 ″ N , 17 ° 13 ′ 27 ″ E