Whether in the north, south, west or east - religious communities can be found all over Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland. Some even make it onto the UNESCO World Heritage List. The former Benedictine monastery of Corvey near Höxter in North Rhine-Westphalia is one such case. The abbey with its Carolingian westwork and the remains of the medieval monastery town of Civitas Corvey was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in June 2014. The World Heritage Site was also awarded to Maulbronn in Baden-Württemberg. Maulbronn is considered one of the best-preserved medieval monastery complexes north of the Alps. The architecture and cultural landscape of the Cistercians can still be seen there - and not only there - almost unaltered to this day.
In addition to the World Heritage Sites, countless monastery streets and monastery districts in many cities are reminiscent of the old town courtyards of the country monasteries - like the Ebra-
The monastery courtyards in the imperial cities of Schweinfurt and Nuremberg are not only of economic importance - they also bear witness to the past centrality of spiritual institutions, even without a UNESCO seal. This even applies to places like Berlin, which secularised their monasteries after the Reformation. Until the beginning of the 19th century, Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries in southern Germany not only developed their agrarian surroundings, but also remained integrated into late medieval and early modern urban development via numerous town courtyards. The Württemberg Cistercian abbey of Bronnbach (see illustration on next page) had town courtyards in Wertheim, Miltenberg, Würzburg, Aschaffenburg and Frankfurt am Main.
Monastery and cultural landscape
The history of Bavaria is also difficult to imagine without its monasteries and abbeys - even Bavarian state historians critical of the church, such as Karl Bosl, have always seen it this way and initiated corresponding research programmes. The regional and ecclesiastical history was supported by regional research into places, districts and names. Relevant field, street and (geographical) landscape names that refer to former monastery property must be correctly assigned.
The Stiftland region of the Upper Palatinate, for example, retains parts of the monastic territory of the former Cistercian abbey of Waldsassen in its name to this day. The Werdenfelser Land is reminiscent of the castle dominion of the same name of the High Abbey of Freising, which was secularised in 1802, and the Upper Bavarian Pfaffenwinkel - the first record of which dates back to 1756 - is reminiscent of the former monasteries of Andechs, Benediktbeuern, Bernried, Dießen, Ettal, Polling, Schlehdorf, Wessobrunn and the Wieskirche around the core area in today's district of Weilheim-Schongau. Research has interpreted this as a relatively recent form of landscape sacralisation.
The "monastery", derived from the Latin term claustrum, is a place where contemplative encounters between people in a communal way of life or a vita communis characterise everyday life. Monasteries - and to a certain extent monasteries with a less worldly constitution - have become interesting again precisely because of their contemplative orientation in our fast-paced consumer, media and industrialised society.
Different types of ensembles and buildings are still important today in the Terra Sacra of Europe, Germany and Bavaria, which are used for economic, religious, political or cultural purposes. Thanks to excellent records, it is still possible today to examine detailed developments in the monastery, the convent, the incorporated parishes and the territory within the historically evolved monastic landscapes. We look behind the walls of existing and secularised monasteries, so to speak, both in southern Germany and from a comparative perspective in other European regions.
On the other hand, Benedictine as well as general monastic messages could only rarely be hidden behind walls, as they were carried into the small to large world outside the monastery walls through the proclamation of the Word of God. The incorporation of numerous parishes in monastery hands was just as much a sign of the verbal character of a landscape as the pulpits of the monastery cathedrals. The famous ship's pulpit in the monastery church in Irsee - which commemorates the victory of the Christian fleet against the Ottoman Empire at Lepanto in 1571 - symbolises the space-defining function of preaching and proclamation. In Regensburg's Benedictine Abbey of St. Emmeram, too, Catholic messages were proclaimed from the magnificent church pulpit in the immediate Protestant neighbourhood of the imperial city on the Danube for centuries, stabilising regional confessional areas.
Monastic landscapes can also be economically concretised, as a collection of maps of the Württemberg Benedictine Abbey of Zwiefalten completed in 1783 shows. The cartographer Placidus Welscher dedicated his hand-coloured work in a Baroque decorative frame to the reigning Abbot Nikolaus II Schmidler (1765-1787). The aim of the commissioned work was to bring order to the inconsistent and confusing system of previous tithe and grain levies to the monastery with the help of detailed maps with location details, field numbers and a true-to-scale reproduction of the arable and grain landscape in "Öschen" (see illustration on next page).
The question remains as to whether re-founded monasteries will continue the secular traditions of Germania Sacra after the dissolution and secularisation of old orders, imperial monasteries and imperial abbeys in modern times. How do you deal with the cultural heritage on site? This is a question that weighs heavily on many convents today, including, for example, the outdated, modest Dominican order in Wettenhausen in eastern Swabia, where the Augustinian canons expanded the monastery and church into a centre in the imperial territory before 1802/03.
The imposing former imperial hall (Habsburg Hall) served to glorify the House of Austria in this landscape-forming context; today it is mostly empty except for school and concert events. Are there opportunities to revitalise old monastery landscapes in event culture? In 2019, an illuminated monastery festival was organised in Wettenhausen with a "long night in the monastery", which attracted thousands of visitors according to a report in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung.
Monastic and sacred landscapes were interpreted in research as largely uniform and self-contained areas. In recent times, the concept of landscape has become almost inflationary; this has been particularly true for the preservation of monuments, art, cultural and historical studies. However, many studies lacked hard criteria, not only from a spatial point of view, to determine where the landscapes ended and how densely they had to be structured at their core in order to be suitable for mapping and spatialisation. For the monastic landscape of the Upper Palatinate, Tobias Appl and Manfred Knedik referred to the respective religious establishments, which "related to each other in very different ways", to the presence of the monasteries in the regional parliaments, to the prelates' awareness of their status, to a sense of togetherness independent of the order that was promoted by prayer fraternities or to reciprocal visits between abbots, provosts and monks, as documented, for example, in the Annales of the Premonstratensian monastery of Speinshart.
The landscape and its borders in the maps of the time
Long before the iconic turn began to influence European historiography in the 1980s, cartography was able to establish itself as an interdisciplinary subject that is still predominantly researched by geoscientists. For practical and conservational reasons, extensive collections of maps were often formed as selections in city and state archives as early as the 19th century. Although they formed a rich source basis for historical and geoscientific research, the context in which they were created was sometimes lost. In recent decades, however, the context of plan, map and file management has been restored in an exemplary manner for the imperial chamber processes held in Bavarian state archives.
If we also include the settlement and dominion areas of old European prince-bishoprics in our considerations, it is better to speak of sacral landscapes rather than monastic landscapes. In the maps of selected high abbeys and monasteries, the dominated space is concretised as a landscape.
Forest surveys by the bishops of Eichstätt
A precisely produced geometric ground plan of the Pfünzer Forest from 1784 serves as a visual and legal record of part of the Eichstätt landscape. The ground plan of the forest, which was produced by the surveyor and mathematician Ignaz Pickel on behalf of the Eichstätt prince-bishop Johann Anton III, is a first and very representative example of the necessity of securing territorial boundaries and privileges even with large-format and pen-drawn maps. The dimensions are shown to scale in decimal shoes and a star indicates the cardinal points orientated to the south-west. The caption presents both threatened Eichstätt privileges - fishing and hunting rights - and the tools used by the surveyor - scale, measuring rod, telescope, globe and angle iron.
Border security in the Banzer monastery area
Monastic landscapes in the Old Kingdom always had to demarcate themselves from their secular neighbours. As an example of countless boundary treaties and associated maps, we present older boundary regulations from the Benedictine Abbey of Banz in Upper Franconia, which were cartographically recorded in 1786. They had a landscape-forming effect. In 1661, the Bamberg Abbey and the Saxon Principality of Coburg settled their long-disputed high court boundaries in the Upper Franconian Itzgrund. This was also an occasion for the Benedictine Abbey of Banz, which had a fortune in the border region, to mark its limited centre against Coburg and Bamberg with a bold red line on the map.
At the end of the Thirty Years' War, Banzer Abbot Michael Stürzel (1648-1664), on the advice of the Bishop of Bamberg, had "a chorographical outline of the district against the Coburg lands drawn up at the earliest opportunity in order to have it described in detail from one district to the next and to send it to Bamberg". He justified this by stating that the land survey was "very important for the demonstration and preservation of this side of the law [and custom], and indeed necessary above all things". Boundary and guiding stones, pillars of honour, markers such as trees and bodies of water, forks in paths and roads or individual farmsteads and mills illustrated a past saturated with privileges along an old Franconian Fraisch district.
It should be noted that the well-researched field of historical cartography is relevant to questions about factors that characterise landscapes and deserves greater attention in the future.
Pilgrimage churches, monasteries and abbeys as centres
There is much to be said for the consistency of sacred and monastic landscapes if we include pilgrimage churches and pilgrimage centres in the study. In the Middle Ages and early modern period, pilgrimage became a testimony of faith, especially when pilgrimage routes to places of pilgrimage were long, arduous and dangerous. For this reason, the vow as votum peregrinationis to undertake a pilgrimage within a certain period of time was of great importance. The votum was particularly common for long-distance pilgrimages and pilgrimage churches stretched across the landscape like strings of pearls.
The study of pilgrimages, individual places of pilgrimage and their cults as well as pilgrimage routes has long been an established field of research in church and regional history and folklore. New publications emphasise a timeless research concern. Pilgrimage calendars also euphorically promise: "Pilgrimage churches are fascinating places of contemplation and harbour a long Christian tradition. Experience sublime buildings where heaven and earth meet, from the Basilica of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary in Styria to Mont Saint-Michel in Brittany. An impressive series of pictures that invites everyone to go on a pilgrimage."
The chronological focus of research naturally lay in the period of origin and heyday of individual pilgrimage centres, rather than in the late period when the biting criticism and mockery of Enlightenment philosophers who despised relics and miracles began. Here we want to focus on the landscape in order to place the pilgrimage events in the general context of the development of norms from the 17th to the 19th century and to ask about the specific piety and church criticism of pilgrimages during the Enlightenment.
Conservative church circles saw the reference to church, procession, cloister and pilgrimage regulations as an anchor of hope against the fundamental criticism of the rite of faith, the traditions of piety and the cult of saints and relics, which was heretised as superstition but indispensable for flourishing pilgrimages such as those in Mariazell in Austria or Maria Einsiedeln in Switzerland.
In 1787, for example, the Augsburg cathedral preacher Georg Zeiler told the cathedral vicariate that he refused to herald from the pulpit the end of the supplications and cloisters to the Holy Mountain in Andechs Monastery. Instead, he referred to the purifying power of the church norms: "All the dangerous, disorderly, offensive, neglectful and distracting things that must necessarily be associated with these crossings will be prevented and made impossible if the faithful comply with the content of this decree". And the cathedral preacher sighed in the face of the widespread criticism of pilgrimages: "I am supposed to convince the people of what I cannot convince myself of".
In addition to episcopal decrees and papal bulls, he based his religious decision on the example of the "most famous saints, namely St Ulrich, bishop and patron saint of our diocese, who was known to be a great admirer of pilgrimages to remote places." During the Enlightenment, however, clerics like Georg Zeiler who were enthusiastic about pilgrimages increasingly found themselves in need of an explanation. Fewer and fewer Christians still believed what had long been true of Mary Magdalene, for example, who was venerated at the Burgundian pilgrimage site of Vézelay: "Out of love for this saint, the Lord forgives sinners their offences, he gives sight to the blind, he loosens the tongue of the mute; the lame are raised up, the possessed are freed from demons, many others are granted unspeakable benefits here."
Way stations off the beaten track? - Crosses, martyrdoms and chapels
Field crosses, wayside shrines, memorial plaques (Marterl), field chapels and bridge saints were and are indicators and evidence of active parishes or formerly intact monastery or sacred landscapes for travellers. As a rule, they are located away from the centres, which means that the spatial dimension of sacred activity - which is characteristic of the landscape - can be surmised or explored on foot. Of course, not all memorial plaques are connected to a parish or the territoriality of the Old Kingdom, for example when we think of the increasing number of crosses at the side of the road as modern rites of remembrance for road victims.
Field crosses were also usually erected as atonement or in memory of the deceased and were not necessarily placed in the landscape, but rather at the place of death or misfortune. Nevertheless, there is a direct connection between a culture of remembrance that has turned to stone and the regional veneration of saints when we think of the patron saints of dioceses, parish and monastery churches. The veneration of St Ulrich is specific to the diocese of Augsburg. The diocese of Würzburg is characterised by the memorial of St. Kilian, the diocese of Bamberg is characterised by the veneration of Heinrich, Kunigunde and Otto, while people pray and make pilgrimages to St. Valentine and Maximilian not only in the diocese of Passau, but increasingly so. In the Passau region, people always sought refuge with St Valentine in times of illness, plague epidemics and Turkish invasions.
Waves of monastic foundations - the Cistercians in Bavaria as an example
Waves of monastery foundations densified sacred spaces. The Cistercian monasteries in what is now the state of Bavaria serve as an example of this process that characterised the landscape. During the 12th century, a formal wave of male monasteries was founded across the country. In chronological order, after Ebrach (1127), these were the Franconian towns of Heilsbronn and Langheim in 1132, Waldsassen and the Swabian Kaisheim/Kaisersheim in 1133, the Bavarian monasteries of Raitenhaslach and Aldersbach in 1143 and 1146, Walderbach Monastery on the River Regen in the Upper Palatinate in 1143, founded by Burgrave Otto I of Riedenburg, and finally Maria Bildhausen Monastery near Münnerstadt in 1158.
This was followed in the 13th century by the monasteries of Fürstenfeld in 1258 and Fürstenzell in 1274 and Gotteszell in the Bavarian Forest in 1285 (see illustration on next page). Cistercian nuns had already been working in Seligenpforten since 1247 in accordance with the Carta Caritatis and remained there until the secularisation of this Upper Palatinate monastery by the Electoral Palatinate rulers in 1576. As far as the monastery buildings were still preserved in the 20th century, Cistercian monks from Bronnbach Monastery took over Seligenpforten in 1931, but this branch near Markt Pyrbaum was abandoned again in 1967.
Monastic communication - networks of a landscape?
Monastic landscapes were always characterised by a high degree of correspondence between individuals, abbeys and orders. The need for correspondence and coordination arose particularly in times of crisis. This has been examined in more detail for the Bavarian monastic landscape in the years before secularisation. In the monasteries of the Upper Palatinate, as well as Upper and Lower Bavaria, there was growing concern about the rising state taxes and they coordinated their efforts to avert the threat of secularisation. Thanks to the letters from the countryside published by Winfried Müller for the period 1794 to 1803 (1812), we are far better informed about the motives for government and the narrow political room for manoeuvre on the part of the abbots and provosts than in Swabia or Franconia.
It is particularly interesting to take a look at the monastery chancelleries there, as the way in which the elector and his governments dealt with the prelates could perhaps provide exemplary lessons for what was yet to come in the new Bavarian provinces. Some, such as Abbot Dominikus Weinberger from Attel - a clever economist - were combative. In his correspondence with Abbot Rupert Kornmann (1757-1817) at Prüfening Abbey in February 1799, he asked for solidarity against the elector's threatening monastery contribution plans.
"On the 6th of this [month of February] I will arrive in Munich at noon in cinere et cilicio, descend into the Weichenstephen monastery house, and visit your esteemed highness without delay. We will then endeavour with united strength to introduce the pleasing business, which the devil has graciously willed to us, into its proper and natural channels. The question is whether it will be worth the effort, for it has long been decided by friends and foes that we must pay regardless of alliances. [...] But let posterity read and hear that we have endeavoured to ease our fate as much as possible, and have only given way to violence. In the crisis in which we find ourselves, nothing else can be hoped for and expected but the compulsion to give. The cloud that stands over our heads is too dense to break through the light of the best writings. Indolent indifference to every fate of spirituality, to religion and religious servants renders all ideas ineffective."
Others were generally more pessimistic, especially when an abbot fell ill, as in the case of Thierhaupten. In June 1798, Father Karl Auracher sent a gift to the chancellor of the Bavarian countryside, Maximilian von Mayrhofen (1757-1819), in place of his ill abbot Michael Schmid (1733-1801). However, the gift was to be handed over by the Abbot of Andechs in accordance with his rank.
Results - the landscape as an open space
In eight sections, we presented arguments that, from a spatial perspective, had their nucleus in one way or another in the monastery, the abbey or in a centre of ecclesiastical territoriality. Precise maps spoke in favour of securing borders to the outside and intensifying rule to the inside. Messages were addressed to the people of the church from the pulpits of the monasteries. Nevertheless, the monastic communication networks extended over long distances, with or without a filiation system. The boundaries to secular authorities and cultures remained fluid, especially as many abbeys used their possessions and influence outside narrow borders for economic advantage through their courts in residential, administrative and imperial cities.
The boundaries of the monastic and sacred landscapes thus remained somewhat diffuse; in any case, they cannot be mapped. They are neither identical with territories nor with religious provinces and certainly not with parish districts. We have to use other criteria in order to do justice to what a landscape has to offer. Living pilgrimage churches, inclusion on the UNESCO cultural heritage list and stone testimonies to faith and belonging, such as those we find in chapels and crosses along the way, are added to concretise the landscape.
Nevertheless, some of the things that we would claim for (Catholic) monastery and sacral landscapes come from a completely different context. The following appeal to the Protestant parishes in the Middle Franconian region has been preserved from the archives of the Protestant consistory in the Principality of Schwarzenberg: "From the High Prince of Schwarzenberg's local Consistorii A.C. [Augsburg Confession] regarding the external soldered parishes: During the summer and autumn, as is well known, the general drought and the subsequent winter, which has lasted until this hour and is still dry, have dried out the soil, especially in the heavy fields, to such an extent that the seeds are hindered in their growth, a poor harvest is expected immediately for the coming year, rather a great drought, and all bread shortages are to be feared, to which is added the fact that all waters and springs are beginning to dry up due to the frost that has lasted for some time, [...] that a general famine would be inevitable as a result, and that it will now be necessary to throw ourselves into the arms of the angry God, who seems to be using such means of punishment for the most just chastisement of our misdeeds, through fervent prayer and other devotions."
Penitential sermons followed immediately "in all parishes". And the "sovereign government of Schwarzenberg" decreed a strict day of fasting, penance and supplication for Wednesday 17 December 1766.
