Cornberg Monastery

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Coordinates: 51 ° 2 ′ 37 ″  N , 9 ° 51 ′ 52 ″  E

Map: Germany
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Cornberg Monastery​
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Germany

The Cornberg Monastery is a listed former Benedictine monastery in Cornberg , a municipality in the Hersfeld-Rotenburg district ( Hesse ).

history

monastery

Monastery entrance with monastery church (right) and eastern wing (left)
Gothic monastery church (northern wing of the monastery area) with the adjoining western wing (right)

The monastery went from one in the later since 1220 desolate fallen location Bubenbach existing Begin house out that formally in 1230 the abbot and convent of the Benedictine imperial abbey Hersfeld had assumed. From 1259 and increasingly from 1275, the mother monastery in Hersfeld tried to turn the small convent into a real monastery. The decisive breakthrough came in 1277 when Vogt Gottfried von Sontra and his wife Gertrud, sister of the Hersfeld abbot Heinrich III. von Boyneburg-Hohnstein , donated a large estate in Elrichsüß to the convent, with Abbot Heinrich acting as the official recipient and countersignatory of the deed of gift. As a result, it was decided to build a new monastery on the grounds of this property. However, construction could not begin until 1292, after the sons of Gottfried, who had meanwhile reached full age, had given their final consent to the transfer of ownership from their parents in 1277. From 1292 to 1296, about 1.5 km north of Bubenbach, where the Cornberger Wasser and the road from Hersfeld to Eschwege bypass a mountain spur in a bend, the new monastery complex on the Corenberg was built. There was a quarry in the immediate vicinity , where the Cornberg sandstone required for construction could be extracted.

The Bubenbach monastery , which had never resided in real monastery buildings, was moved to its new location in December 1295 in the deeper, warmer and more protected valley. The monastery church was dedicated to Mary, the Mother of God. Lukardis von Hohnstein, a cousin of the new Hersfeld abbot Heinrich IV von Boyneburg and a nun in Bubenbach since 1272, became the first prioress . The first own document of the monastery, the provost Hartlib and the prioress Lukardis / Lutgardis comes from September 1297. In 1393 28 nuns lived in the convent. Otherwise, no information has been passed on about its size. The nuns came from the regional nobility or were of wealthy bourgeois origin; only from 1350 onwards were women from rural families represented. The prioress was always of noble origin. The provost was always a Hersfeld monk or canon .

The financial bottleneck caused by the construction of the monastery was overcome soon after the turn of the century and it was possible to acquire additional property. Nevertheless, the monastery never became and was never rich. In the second half of the 14th century it was wealthy in almost 60 places, mostly with annual donations in money or in kind. Around 1350 it had 13 farms and estates, most of which however only comprised 3–4 hooves ; only the estates in Mönchhosbach , Lindenau and Hübenthal (near Berneburg) were larger with 9 hooves each. The farm in Cornberg was by far the most important with 22 hooves.

Estate and domain

In 1525, Landgrave Philip the Magnanimous took half of Cornberg into his possession as payment for the military aid he had given to the Hersfeld abbot Crato I in suppressing the peasant uprising . A year later, in 1526, the monastery was closed in the Landgraviate of Hesse as part of the introduction of the Reformation . In the presence of the mayor of Sontra, two nuns had to deliver the monastery letters to the landgrave mayor Conrad Ruschenberg zu Sontra and were given a lapel with the Sontra town seal. The nuns were as resigned in other Hessian monasteries. The complex was converted into an agricultural estate, half of which was owned by Hessian and half by Hersfeld.

Landgrave Philipp pledged Cornberg after 1556 to Wilhelm Werner von Schachten , the son of his Marshal Wilhelm von Schachten, who died in 1553 . The Landgrave compared himself to the Hersfeld Abbot Michael Landgrave in that they could both redeem the estate of Schachten's children in equal parts. The redemption took place in 1568 under Landgrave Wilhelm IV ; each side paid 1583 thalers and 2 albus .

In 1572, William IV had. His illegitimate son Philip William record chapters and him still as in the existing of only three people Hersfelder sinecures transfer existing provost of the longest repealed monastery Cornberg, so that he, the income from this sinecure could enjoy. In his reverse letter, Philipp Wilhelm committed himself to obedience to the abbot and to an annual fee and signed as Philippus Wilhelmus de Cornberg. (He only received the imperial nobility letter as "von Cornberg" on March 29, 1597 in Prague from Emperor Rudolf II. ) On February 22, 1580 he also received the Hessian half of Cornberg for life. When Abbot Ludwig V refused to allow Philipp Wilhelm's intended marriage in 1582, he left the clergy, received the Hessian half of Cornberg from his father on August 11, 1582 as a hereditary fiefdom and married Christine von on September 3, 1582 in Cornberg Falcken. In 1584 he received the Hersfeld half of Cornberg as a fief; Abbot Ludwig V was compensated by the landgrave with 2,500 guilders. The fief was renewed in 1592 by Abbot Crato II and in 1593 by the last Abbot of Hersfeld, Joachim Roell .

After the death of his father in 1598, Philipp Wilhelm resigned to the new Landgrave, his half-brother Moritz , Cornberg and instead received 10,000 Reichstaler and, as a right man's fief, the village of Richelsdorf, about 12 km further east-southeast, with high and low courts and church patronage , as well as upper and lower courts Niedergude , Landefeld and Auburg Castle with the village of Wagenfeld in what is now Lower Saxony.

As early as 1615, Cornberg was owned by Landgrave's wife Juliane von Nassau-Dillenburg , and in 1627 Cornberg became part of the Rotenburger Quart , with which Landgrave Moritz provided his sons from his second marriage to Juliane. It was a bailiwick that was until the extinction of the Landgrave of Hesse-Rotenburg in 1834 in their possession and then to Kurhessen fell back.

From 1834 to 1964 the facility was a state domain , from 1946 owned by the State of Hesse . In addition to the monastery, 22 residential and farm buildings as well as more than 300 hectares of fields and meadows belonged to the estate at that time.

From 1945 to 1949, the whole place Cornberg and the former monastery building were a DP camp of the UNRRA , in the majority of former forced laborers from the Soviet Union and Poland were staying. Many of them emigrated from here to Canada and the USA.

Todays use

The state domain was closed in 1964. As early as 1957, unused and decaying commercial and residential buildings around the actual monastery had been gradually demolished. With the abandonment of domain operations, the general decline accelerated. All of the remaining outbuildings were demolished by 1973, including the former provost's office in 1974. The cloister , still visible on a pen drawing by Landgrave Moritz from 1630, had long since disappeared. Only the Gothic monastery area was preserved.

In 1989 the state of Hesse decided to preserve the monastery area. The renovation took four and a half years, from 1990 to 1994, and cost more than 12 million DM . The former church (the northern wing of the square) with the still preserved nuns' gallery is now used as a cultural stage. The community center is housed in the south wing. In the west wing there is the museum which provides information about the Cornberg sandstone , the Cornberg dinosaur track and the history of the monastery and the mining settlement Cornberg; it is open from March to October on Sundays and public holidays from 2 p.m. to 5.30 p.m. In the east wing there is a restaurant and hotel.

In 2001 Karl-Heinz Becker organized a festival that competed with the Burg-Herzberg-Festival . Kraan , Epitaph and Amon Düül stood on the stage .

architecture

Monastery courtyard, south (left) and west side

The buildings of the central, square monastery area were plain and simple. They were solidly built from Cornberg sandstone on a small hill. There was only one gate leading into the inner courtyard from the provost's office in the east, which was broken into a wide driveway after it was converted into an agricultural estate. The complex, which was still completely preserved in its closedness, was badly disintegrated and uninhabited before the renovation.

The church, which was built shortly before 1300 and formed the north wing, was an unadorned, single-nave, Gothic building of seven bays with a five-eighth end . In its western part was the nun's gallery above a cross vault, which the nuns could access through an entrance from the upper floor of the western wing. The clergy entered the church from the priory to the men's choir. A small, asymmetrically arranged tower rose above the western front. Only the end of the choir and the eastern yoke were preserved in their original form with vaults ; this part of the former monastery church was used for worship for the small community of Cornberg until the 19th century. The rest of the church building had long been in profane use, and a passage into the inner courtyard had been broken into the building.

The ground floors of the wings enclosing the square courtyard on the other three sides had been converted into stables for cows, horses and pigs, and the upper floors as storage rooms.

swell

  • Julius Ludwig Christian Schmincke: Document book of the Cornberg monastery (= magazine of the association for Hessian history and regional studies , first supplement, volume 1, issue 2). Commission publisher by August Freyschmidt, Kassel 1872, pp. 121–196.
  • Johannes Burkardt (Ed.): Documents and Regesta of the Cornberg Monastery . (Publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse, 9: Klosterarchive, Vol. 9.) Marburg 2010.

literature

  • Johannes Burkardt: Cornberg . In: The Benedictine monasteries and nunneries in Hesse (Germania Benedictina VII), in connection with Regina Elisabeth Schwerdtfeger arr. v. Friedhelm Jürgensmeier and Franziskus Büll, EOS Verlag, St. Ottilien 2004, pp. 116–124.
  • Ernst Henn: Cornberg: Fate of a women's community, 1230–1526. Books on Demand, Norderstedt, 2006, ISBN 3-8334-4135-6
  • Johannes Burkardt (Ed.): Documents and Regesta of the Cornberg Monastery. (Publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse, vol. 99), Marburg, 2010, ISBN 978-3-942225-02-1
  • JL Chr. Schmincke: History of the Cornberg Monastery according to documented sources. In: Association for Hessian History and Regional Studies e. V. Kassel 1834 (Hrsg.): Journal of the association for Hessian history and regional studies. New series, volume 1. Kassel, 1867, pp. 160–203
  • Heimat- und Verkehrsverein Cornberg e. V. (ed.); Heinz Moch: 700 years Cornberg Monastery 1292 / 96-1996. Glockdruck, Bad Hersfeld, 1996
  • Georg Dehio: Handbook of the German art monuments, Hessen. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich, 1966

Web links

Commons : Cornberg Monastery  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Wüstung Elrichsüß, Hersfeld-Rotenburg". Historical local dictionary for Hessen. In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).
  2. ^ Abbot Ludwig Landau, dean Crato Weissenbach and Philipp Wilhelm.
  3. ↑ Cornberg Monastery Sandstone Museum