Church stalls
Under pews means the seating in a church, both those for the liturgy persons involved as well as the worshipers . Their function and construction is determined by different ecclesiastical occasions and traditions. In addition, the seating furniture is shaped differently in terms of art history and region and in part reflects ecclesiastical and secular hierarchies.
history
Apart from the cathedra of the bishop and the sediles of the clergy , there were no benches or chairs in the churches until the High Middle Ages . People attended the liturgy standing, kneeling or walking. It was not until the late Middle Ages - at the end of the 14th century in some Bavarian parish churches, in the 15th century especially in the churches of the order of preachers - that seats were set up for the faithful, which could soon be reserved. In general, the seating only became common in the Reformation era, based on the Protestant territories.
Orthodox church building
Orthodox church buildings are traditionally without chairs or benches. There is often a row of seats on the side walls only for the old and the weak. For high-ranking personalities, stalls commensurate with their status may be provided, similar to those in Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. For example, the Assumption Cathedral , the coronation church of the tsars in the Moscow Kremlin , has a tsar's throne from 1551 and an equally magnificent patriarchal chair close to the iconostasis . Peter the Great on the other hand stood before his master, but he had to a very representative standing room in his St. Petersburg Peter and Paul Cathedral . In Greece nowadays stackable chairs are common, in diaspora communities there are often pews as well. Some believers deliberately refrain from using the seat.
Roman Catholic church building
A cathedral has a representative, raised bishop's chair (Greek cathedra = seat), which is located in the choir . A particularly elaborate example is the early Byzantine ivory chair of Bishop Maximian of Ravenna .
Many churches, insofar as they are or were monastery or collegiate churches , have choir stalls in the choir area, typically reserved for solemn professed professions , in which the convent performs the choir prayers together . In the past, the choir stalls were usually made of finer material and with much greater artistic and craftsmanship than the lay stalls or folk stalls . It is therefore not surprising that there is hardly any literature on the latter.
A typical church chair of the Middle Ages is the three seat , also a Levite chair or celebrant seat in the chancel with places for the celebrating priest in the middle as well as for the deacon and sub-deacon .
Protestant church building
Patronage churches had prominent, reserved seats for the patron's family near the altar or at another preferred location, usually in the form of a patronage box .
There were also special seats for other church officials and dignitaries, such as B. the church father's chair for the "church father" or church father (lat. Vitricus ecclesiae ), which corresponds to today's church caretaker (church governor). These places were also near the altar. The pastor's chair was the pastor's seat and preparation area.
Corresponding to the class system of the community, pews of the corporations joined, first of the council , then of the guilds and offices / guilds or the scoops , only then rented or private spaces. The stalls were often designed as self-contained box stalls and oriented towards the pulpit in Protestant churches . Reformed churches in particular or the worship rooms of Protestant free churches are mostly designed as sermon churches . The rental fees for chair seats, which a chairwoman took care of, was an important regular income of the parishes before the introduction of the church tax .
- Chair plan of the Marienkirche in Lüneburg
ground floor
lower gallery
upper gallery
Pews
The lay stalls or folk stalls in the nave have been found in almost all Roman Catholic and Protestant churches since modern times , but are mostly missing in Orthodox churches .
The oldest surviving pews in England, for example, date from the late 13th century. While pews in Roman Catholic churches only slowly gained acceptance, they were typical of Protestant churches from the beginning of the Reformation . This development is related to the special weight that Protestantism places on the one hand on the sermon as a medium of mediation of salvation and on the other hand on the personal experience of faith. Sitting down, the believer could devote himself entirely to the message from the pulpit or to his inner devotion .
The different liturgy of the denominations is also reflected in the design of the pews. A textbook for cabinet makers from 1892 states that the height of benches for Protestant churches should be around one meter, while in Roman Catholic churches it is only 80 to 90 cm, as the Roman rite involves repeated kneeling down the knee board in front of the bench.
Since folk stalls were not raised on a substructure like choir stalls, they were often more exposed to the moisture rising from the ground and thus to decay. The late Gothic pews by Erhart Falckener in the Simultankirche Bechtolsheim (1496) and in the parish church of St. Valentinus in Kiedrich (1510) are among the oldest completely preserved pews in Germany . The fact that these stalls have been preserved can also be attributed to the poverty of the communities, which forbade the widespread baroque trend at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Where the pulpit and organ can not be arranged one above the other for architectural reasons - unlike in the churches of George Bähr , for example - the audience in the pews usually experiences the organ and choir music from behind, with their backs to the instrument and the choir - es the eye contact is missing. But when the Wurzener Dom near Leipzig was redesigned in 1932, resourceful craftsmen came up with the solution that is still practiced today, in order to "turn the congregation 180 degrees" and look to the music: the desk bar is used for the hymn books for every pew Thanks to the longitudinal rotation around its own axis, the arm can move to the back of the next pew within seconds. In this way - by turning the desk, so to speak - the Sermon Church is transformed, looking east to the altar and pulpit, to the oratorio hall, looking west to the choir and organ.
particularities
Confessionals
Confessionals can be found in almost all Catholic churches. Usually they offer a seat for the priest and a knee bench for the person confessing.
Chairs at the sacrament table
To emphasize the table character of the Lord's Supper table , many churches of Reformed and Congregational style have set up seating behind the table. In some of these churches, sacrament participants sit here in small groups. In other churches (for example with the Baptists ) the seating is reserved for the parishioners who take care of the celebration of the meal and the distribution of the Lord's Supper. In the Herrnhut Brothers Church , the middle seat remains empty - a symbol of the invisible presence of the actual Lord of the table, Jesus Christ .
Prayer chairs
A bed chair is a knee bench. Prayer chairs are not only used in churches, but also in monastery cells , private apartments, denominational retirement homes, etc.
Bridal chairs
Many churches in Germany have two particularly artistically designed armchairs or knee benches, which are used as bridal chairs for church weddings .
Whore chairs
A whore's chair or whore's stool was a special church chair for women who were punished for "fornication". Such a shame chair still existed in the church of Upfingen in 1790 . A discussion of the legitimacy and use of the whore chair is given by Johann Ferdinand Schlez in his village chronicle from 1794.
See also
literature
- C. Wels: Parish church in Kiedrich and the late Gothic village churches in the Rheingau. ( PDF file , 5.0 MB) Steinbach 2003, pp. 59–62.
- H. Sobel: The church furniture Erhart Falckeners and his workshop. Mainz 1980 ( PDF ).
- Gabriela Signori : Controversial chairs: late medieval church stalls as a social, political and religious communication medium , in; Journal for Historical Research 29 (2002), pp. 189-213
- Olivia Mackowiak: The church stalls in modern church building, in: Wiener, Jürgen u. Körner, Hans: Liturgy as a client? Modern sacred architecture and its equipment between function and form, Essen (2010), pp. 201–211.
Web links
- Fraunhofer Information Center for Space and Construction
- heimatverein-rosstal.de The church chair as an object of dispute
Individual evidence
- ↑ h. M. Johenning: Moscow , Peter Rump Verlag, Bielefeld 2010, p. 170
- ^ Peter Draper: The Formation of English Gothic: Architecture and Identity. Yale University Press, New Haven 2006. p. 205. cf. Eric Fernie: The Architecture of Norman England, Oxford University Press 2000. p. 231.
- ↑ Andreas Stiene: From Sitting in the Church - Or how the pew promoted democracy ; in: Andreas Stiene, Karl Wilhelm: Old stones - new life. History and stories of the Evangelical village church in Stetten im Remstal ; ed. Ev. Parish of Stetten im Remstal, Stetten im Remstal 1998, pp. 101-103
- ↑ Wolfgang Lück: The image in the Church of the Word: An introduction to the world of images of Protestant churches. LIT Verlag, Berlin, Hamburg, Münster 2001. S. 17ff.
- ^ Theodor Krauth and Franz Sales Meyer: The entire cabinet maker. EA Seemann, Leipzig 1892; P. 179 ff.
- ↑ Fritz Fichtner: The cathedral to Wurzen and its renewal. Special print from: Saxon architectural and art monuments . Published by the Landesverein Sächsischer Heimatschutz, Dresden 1933, p. 23.
- ↑ http://www.zeno.org/Pierer-1857/A/Betstuhl?hl=betstuhl
- ↑ Brief mention by Christel Köhle-Hezinger in Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Das Evangelische Pfarrhaus - ein Abgesang , June 27, 2009 [1]
- ^ W. von Gutzeit, Wörterschatz der Deutschen Sprache Livland , N. Kymmel , Riga 1864, 1st volume, p. 552
- ^ Richard van Dülmen, Culture and Everyday Life in the Early Modern Age: Village and City: 16th - 18th Century , CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-45016-4 Volume 2, pp. 327/328
- ↑ Johann Ferdinand Schlez , History of the little village Traubenheim: written for the people and for people's friends , Grattenauer, Nuremberg, 2nd edition 1794, Volume 1, pp. 42-44