Forum for Research on Convents of Canonesses

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Julia von Ditfurth
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 389429394

The Forum for Research on Convents of Canonesses concentrates on convents of canonesses from the time of their founding in the Early Middle Ages to the period of their secularization at the beginning of the 19th century. Interrogations pertaining to the history of art shall be pursued by means of an interdisciplinary cooperation of art history, history, theology and musicology. The focus lies on convents of canonesses - women who lived according to the rules of the so-called Institutio sanctimonialium Aquisgranensis of 816 without taking the vows of any order. Female monasteries, male monasteries and convents of canons will also be taken into consideration for the sake of comparison, in order to provide the analysis with additional contours and to differentiate the research findings. The main area of interest is the sacral buildings of the convent, their furnishings and the liturgical use of both. Profane buildings will recede into the background on account of a lack of written or material sources and objects for the Middle Ages. Research about church buildings and their furnishings, by contrast, is based more extensively on preserved substance. It is thus possible to connect research on them with current debates about such topics as performance and rituals, the position, furnishings and use of galleries for the canonesses, mediality and intermediality or concerning the separation and/or interaction of different social groups within a church. All this makes it possible to apply the discussion and the results of the Forum for Research on Convents of Canonesses to further disciplines, including, for example, liturgical studies, media history, legal history and social history.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks