Publication details
The Chapter House and the Cloister of the Mendicant Monastery in the Context of Medieval and Early Modern Town
| Title in English | The Chapter Houses and the Cloister of the Mendicant Monastery in the Context of Medieval and Early Modern Town |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Already in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Minorite and Dominican orders (or the Poor Clares and Dominican women) played an important role in town building in terms of religion and social ties, as well as the architectural layout and urban development. The Franciscan Order became important in the urban environment from the late fifteenth and in the sixteenth century, contributing with other monasteries to shaping the changing urban religiosity. This article aims to suggest the perspectives of studying the relationship between Mendicant monasteries and the urban environment, for which the monasteries of the Mendicant orders (whether their male or female establishments) are typical. The area of interest, however, is not the monastic church but the chapter house and the cloister. Despite the assumed rules of the enclosure, we can register the presence of the lay public in these spaces too, and thus we can study a partial interconnection between the "outer" secular and the "inner" sacred monastic world. The interdisciplinary approach, based on a combination of the research results by historians, art historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, helps to better understand the conditions under which this interconnection could take place. Urban "artistic" and memorial presentations in the monastic context can be traced together with activities that were organised in the cloister (e.g. funerals, religious processions), as well as and in the chapter house, which was also used for other types of laity gatherings (e.g. a court or guild chapel). The monasteries in the Czech Republic, including Brno, Český Krumlov and Jindřichův Hradec, are given as examples. This article also focuses on whether (or to what extent) it is possible to trace the changing religiosity of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in cloisters and chapter houses, both in a more general sense (e.g. the preference of donors in favour of the Franciscans over the Minorites) and in terms of visual (stylistic) manifestation. |
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