Reinhausen Monastery

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Reinhausen Abbey on a Merian engraving around 1654

Reinhausen Monastery is a former Benedictine abbey south of Göttingen in Gleichen , Reinhausen district .

history

In their ancestral castle Reinhausen the brothers Konrad, Heinrich and Hermann (III.), Counts von Reinhausen, and their sister Mathilde first founded a canonical foundation in 1079 - by mutual agreement they had the place where they had their origin, God and the Eternal Virgin Mary and especially the holy martyr Christophorus. They appointed four canons and a provost named Sibold. The counts moved their castle seat to their newly built castles on the Gleichen . Countess Mathilde then married a Bavarian Count von Formbach and gave birth to a son Hermann, who later named himself after the Winzenburg castle .

After the provost's death, since the place belonged to his inheritance, Count Hermann established an order of monks there with the consent of his co-heirs and transferred everything that he owned in the field march of the village, along with the tithing he had exchanged, to the church and his ministerials and servants allowed to give yourself and yours there at will. A Benedictine monastery was founded here and - after the election by the monastery brothers and after the abbot ordination by Archbishop Adalbert I of Mainz - Reinhard was appointed as the first abbot of the monastery (the document confirming the foundation of the monastery or its inauguration, issued by Archbishop Adalbert of Mainz on December 3, 1111, but has been proven to be a forgery both in terms of the date and partly of the content). A short time later, around 1114, Hermann III moved. to Bavaria to his sister Mathilde, where he died in 1122.

The first abbot Reinhard of the Reinhausen monastery reports on the founding of the monastery and the family of the founders. The abbot's report took place at the old age of the abbot (after 1152). He died on May 7, 1156 and was buried in the Reinhausen monastery church , where his grave slab was still in the 17th century. The damaged oval seal of the certificate of brown wax on strips of parchment shows the seated abbot with a crook, holding a book in his left hand, and the legend: REINARDVS. DEI. G (RA. REI) N (EHVSENSIS. ABBAS. The original was in the State Archives in Hanover under Certificate of Reinhausen Monastery No. 2. A copy of this document is available in the University and State Library of Düsseldorf.

West view of the monastery house (top left) and the former monastery church (2013)

In the 15th century the abbey was reformed after a phase of decline and, together with the abbeys of Bursfelde and Clus and Huysburg, was one of the earliest members of the Bursfeld congregation . The return to the original ideals of monastic life had an effect. a. in the construction of a new hospital and infirmary in 1460.

In 1542 Reinhausen became Lutheran, in 1552 only two Lutheran convent members lived in the monastery and in 1574 monastic life in Reinhausen finally ceased with the death of the last abbot. The monastery church and parts of the remaining monastery buildings were preserved.

literature

  • Peter Aufgebauer : About Reinhausen Castle, Monastery and Church - and German history. In: 1000 years of the church on the Kirchberg in Reinhausen. The millennium book on 1000 years of church, culture and life. Edited by Henning Behrmann u. a., Reinhausen 2015, pp. 18–35.
  • Manfred Hamann : Everyday life in Reinhausen Monastery on the eve of the Reformation. In: Yearbook of the Society for Church History of Lower Saxony 88/1990, pp. 75–94.
  • Nicolaus Heutger: Bursfelde and its reform monasteries . Hildesheim 1975.
  • Tobias Ulbrich: On the history of the Reinhausen monastery church . Göttingen 1993.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedrich Kolbe, Archbishop Adalbert I of Mainz and Heinrich V, Heidelberg 1872, p. 139 ff.

Coordinates: 51 ° 28 ′ 4.4 ″  N , 9 ° 59 ′ 0 ″  E