Lüne Abbey

Lüne Abbey was founded in 1172 by a small community of no more than 10 noblewomen from Nordborstel. The group, led by Hildeswidis von Marcboldestorpe, was allowed to move into a vacant chapel that had been built as a hermitage for a monk from Lüneburg in 1140. The foundation charter was signed by Hugo, bishop of Verden, Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, and Berthold II., abbott of the monastery St Michael in Lüneburg.[2] The convent was dedicated to St Bartholomew and kept a part of the apostle's robe as the convent’s main relic.[3] Although initially the convent did not follow any specific monastic rule, it adopted the Rule of Saint Benedict during the course of the 13th century. The original convent buildings burned down two times (in 1240 and in 1372) and were subsequently rebuilt closer to the city of Lüneburg.[4]

Over the course of the 13th century, the convent grew steadily to a number of up to 60 nuns. They were mainly recruited from surrounding noble families and from the patrician families of Lüneburg. To cover the general living expenses, the convent relied first and foremost on the yearly income from the local saltworks that it held as a Pfandherr (pledge lord) since 1229. In 1367, the community had grown so influential and wealthy that it openly refused to accept its papally appointed provost Giles of Tusculum, a powerful cardinal bishop, and instead elected their own candidate, the lesser known Conrad of Soltau. In the end, both parties agreed on a third candidate, Johannes Weigergang, and Pope Urban V granted the nuns the privilege to elect their own provost.[5] As premodern female convents had to rely on a male provost to represent the community’s political and economical interests to the outside world, this privilege of free election implied the highest degree of autonomy the convent could obtain. In 1395, the Lüne provost was granted the full sacramental care of the nuns, so that the convent was now de facto autonomous, both politically and spiritually.

The 15th century brought with it a widespread desire for ecclesiastical reform, and the monastic orders were no exception. The reform movement (not to be confused with the Protestant Reformation) firmly established itself in Northern Germany in the early second half of the century.[6] The emerging reform theologians viewed the rich and influential convents of the north as having diverted from the original, rightful teachings of Christianity, first and foremost the ideal of poverty, but also their interference in the temporal sphere and a decline in Latin education were criticised. For a long time, historians have adopted the latter claim unaudited, but whether or not and to what extends it was actually accurate has to be evaluated individually for each convent. In most examined cases, however, the production of Latin writing within the women’s convents shows no sign of the alleged decline in education.[7] Lüne Abbey agreed nonetheless to undergo reformative measures, and took in the provost and seven nuns from the nearby Ebstorf Abbey which had already undergone reforms, in 1481. The provost, Matthias von dem Knesebeck, deposed the prioress Bertha Hoyer and her subprioress, and installed his own candidate, the former Ebstorf nun Sophia von Bodenteich.[8]

The reform included an enhanced curriculum in matters of Catholic doctrine, a changed liturgy in conformity with the reform, and a centralized and communal intake of daily meals to strengthen the convent’s isolation from the outside world and to better control the required abstinence from meat on Fridays and during Lent. The latter arguably provided the greatest logistical difficulty, as both the kitchen and the refectory had to be rebuilt.[9] Subsequently, the convent was incorporated into a dense network of reformed Northern German female convents and their male provosts, most of them committed reformers, which became a regional power within ecclesiastical politics.

The territorial fragmentation of political sovereignty in Germany on the outset of the 16th century pushed the individual territorial lords (‘’Landesherren’’) into the position of the official decision-maker regarding the acceptance or rejection of the new Reformation process.[10] The monastic convents had to fear for their survival, as the new movement set out to secularize and expropriate what they saw as an expression of the decadence and detachment from the faithful in the outside world.[11] Lüne Abbey fell into the jurisdiction of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg which had been the main site of the Hildesheim Diocesan Feud in 1519. The convent suffered greatly under the joint raids of the princes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and Calenberg, at some point even having to evacuate the convent building and move into the city of Lüneburg itself.[12] The feud saw Brunswick-Lüneburg fall into major debt and its convents become weakened as a result. In 1525, as many German territories had to face peasant uprisings, Duke Ernest I tried to quickly consolidate his budget by sending a demand over 28,000 guilders to all convents in Brunswick-Lüneburg which he threatened to enforce by a military show of force, if necessary.[13] It did not take long after that, however, for the duke to publicly declare his allegiance to the cause of the Reformation and thus target the Roman Catholic convents directly.[14] The female convents of Brunswick-Lüneburg, tightly knit together since the monastic reform of 1481, staunchly opposed the duke’s demands, and the situation effectively went into a standstill for the next four years. In 1529, Duke Ernest and his court decided to break up the monastic network by first targeting its male provosts. He hoped to replace them one by one with a Protestant preacher loyal only to the duke himself, as those provosts had once themselves deposed the old leadership of the convents without much opposition.[15] Indeed, in late 1529, the Lüne provost Johannes Lorber resigned from his post and made way for a ducal administrator, Johannes Haselhorst, and a Protestant preacher, Hieronymous Enkhusen. In the following year, these measures were followed up by the inception of a new monastic policy which changed the liturgy within the convents drastically and nullified all monastic vows. The female communities were explicitly stated to be the new religious enemies.[16] In 1531, one of the ducal tax collectors even went so far as to destroy one of the chapels of Lüne Abbey, consecrated to Saint Gangulphus of Burgundy. As prioress Mechthild von Wilde died in 1535, the nuns’ opposition against the Reformation faltered altogether. Although the convent was able to independently elect a new prioress, Elisabeth Schneverding, they accepted their incorporation into the Protestant Landeshoheit of the duke. Duke Ernest, on the other hand, surprisingly accepted that the convent remained a secular foundation for unmarried Protestant women (Damenstift), and did not dissolve the institution as a whole.[17] It took, however, until 1562, for the convent to elect its first decidedly Protestant head.

Over the course of the following two centuries, the community had a somewhat ambiguous status. Outwardly, it was treated as a purely secular retirement institution, but inwardly, the community still led a highly devoted spiritual life in Benedictine tradition. In 1711, this tension was resolved in an agreement between the convent and Duke George-Louis (later George I of Great Britain) in favour of the secular role that came to dominate also within the convent walls. Lüne Abbey would find itself as part of a war zone two more times. In 1793, a French army marched through nearby territory during the First Coalition War in which the Electorate of Hanover took part on the side of the anti-French coalition. The abbess, Artemisia von Bock, anticipated an upcoming occupation of the convent and quickly sold a large stock of artworks, manuscripts and books from the library, some into private hands, some into the care of larger archives and depositories nearby. During World War II many of those archives fell victim to Allied bombing raids, and many more artworks and manuscripts vanished within the turmoils near the end of the war when German administrative structures collapsed and effectively ceased to exist.[18]