Lippoldsberg Monastery
The Lippoldsberg Monastery (also Lipsberg) is a former Benedictine women monastery that formed the origin of the place Lippoldsberg on the Weser in northern Hesse.
history
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Between 1051 and 1059, the then Archbishop Lippold of Mainz came to today's Lippoldsberg and had the first wooden church built here. The reason was probably the favorable location: Lippoldsberg was on one of the few fords on the Oberweser and on the way from the Rhine via Geismar to Thuringia. He acquired the land from Corvey Monastery .
When Lippold's successor, Siegfried von Mainz , was imprisoned by Emperor Heinrich for four years in 1078 , he made a vow to build a stone church dedicated to Saint George in Lippoldsberg . The church was richly endowed: the Mainz own church of Oedelsheim and the clergy from five villages around Lippoldsberg (including Bodenfelde ) were subordinated to it. Archbishop Ruthard founded the women's monastery here in 1086, and monastery complexes were built until around 1093. The bailiff for the monastery should lie with the Counts of Northeim.
The first actual document of the monastery, the nuns' oath, can be dated to 1099–1101. Here 25 nuns pledge to follow the Hirsau Reform regulations as Benedictine nuns, following the example of the St. Agnes monastery in Schaffhausen . This well-known nun's oath was signed by a total of 117 leading bishops, abbots and secular princes.
In 1137 the convent elected the Augustinian canon Gunther as provost, who resisted, but was confirmed by the Pope himself. He built a new church relatively soon, which was to be consecrated as early as 1151. It is the first arched church in the region, forty years before the vaulting of the central nave of the Mainz Cathedral . In 1151 the “Chronikon”, commissioned by the abbess Margarethe , was published, which is supposed to report on the first 100 years of the monastery history.
Since a large part of the nuns' occupation consisted of copying books and other documents, the library of the monastery had already grown to 61 volumes by the time the Chronikon was created. The stock list handed down in the Chronikon offers essential insights into the spiritual world of the 12th century.
Despite a few setbacks, the monastery flourished in the following centuries, so that it was soon possible to finance the construction of a protective castle, the forerunner of the later Sababurg .
On March 11, 1538, the then sovereign Philip of Hesse introduced the Reformation in Hesse. The residents of the monastery on the border were not, as elsewhere, expelled. The estates of the monastery fell to the dukes of Brunswick; however, the monastery and the village remained in the possession of the Hessian landgraves. In the forties there was a freeze on novices, so that the gradual extinction of the monastery was predetermined. In 1563 the monastery property was inventoried, and in 1564 the first Protestant pastor was appointed pastor of Lippoldsberg. He shared the church with the monastery until the nuns and the last abbess Lutrudis von Boyneburg died out in 1569. Now the monastery church was completely transferred to the Protestant community for further use, and the story of the actual monastery ends.
The monastery complex went through even more confusion in the future. In 1644, during the Thirty Years War, the tower of the church, onto which the population had fled, was shelled until it caught fire. The church suffered little damage, however, and the tower was renewed by 1667. Around 1713, the unused west wing of the monastery was converted into a hunting lodge by Landgrave Karl von Hessen . In 1722 the church tower was given today's baroque dome.
In the 19th century, the baptismal font created between 1230 and 1240 was found again. This stone, richly decorated with scenic representations and figures, was probably removed from the church during the iconoclasm at the time of Landgrave Moritz and buried in the churchyard as an eaves or trough.
After the First World War , the so-called hunting lodge in the west wing of the monastery was acquired by the ethnic writer Hans Grimm . In the 1960s, remains of mosaics and columns were found in this complex, which suggest the original arrangement of the cloister.
architecture
The monastery church is an elongated cruciform basilica with a main apse and two side apses. Of the two towers of the west building , only the southern one is executed, the northern one only extends to the eaves of the side aisle, but there is a patronage box between the two . The domical groin vaults of the central nave stand on round arched belt arches , but are themselves pointed . So that they form the synthesis of two approaches that you tried in the development of Romanesque architecture, the problem of side thrust classic arched vault to get a grip: In the Cluny Abbey were built since 1080 pointed vault, the nave of the cathedral at Speyer has round arched domical vault. Under the choir there is a three-aisled crypt with "normal" groin vaults on graceful columns.
Chronicles
The history of the Lippoldsberg Monastery is based primarily on three essential records:
- The Lippoldsberger "Chronikon", which reports the early days of the monastery in 1151 and which has been completely preserved.
- The "Itter Tower Knob Chronicle", which was written by Bailiff Conrad Itter in 1722 and dates back to 1437. It bears its name because it was kept in the tower knob of the monastery church and survived the centuries.
- the chronicle that Pastor Carl Emil Stock created in 1913, mainly from the parish archives, and which tries to close the gap from 1722 to 1913.
literature
- Dieter Grossmann: Church and Monastery of St. Georg, Lippoldsberg. Evang. Lippoldsberg parish office 1961.
- Jochen Desel : The Lippoldsberg Monastery and its foreign possessions. Gutenberg, Melsungen 1967.
- Johann Josef Böker : The 'Lippoldsberger Building School': On sociogenesis and reception of a church building form of the 12th century. In: Franz J. Much (Hrsg.): Architecture of the Middle Ages in Europe. Hans Erich Kubach on his 75th birthday . Society for Art and Monument Preservation, Stuttgart 1988, pp. 123–140.
- Thorsten Quest, Uta Schäfer-Richter: Village life. The history of the villages Lippoldsberg and Vernawahlshausen. Published by the municipality of Wahlsburg . Publishing house Die Werkstatt GmbH, Göttingen, 1989.
Web links
- Literature by and about Lippoldsberg Monastery in the catalog of the German National Library
- Art-historical classification of the monastery church Information about the church of the former monastery in Lippoldsberg.
Coordinates: 51 ° 37 ′ 31.4 " N , 9 ° 33 ′ 27" E