Medingen Abbey

Medingen Convent
Medingen Convent St. Maurice
Medingen Convent Location of Convent Medingen in Lower Saxony, Germany
Coordinates: 53°05′26″N 10°33′55″E / 53.090601°N 10.565176°E / 53.090601; 10.565176
Location	Medingen, Lower Saxony
Country	Germany
Denomination	Protestant Lutheran
Previous denomination	Catholic
Website	www.kloster-medingen.de
History
Founded	1241
Architecture
Status	Convent
Functional status	Active

Medingen Abbey or Medingen Convent (German: Kloster Medingen) is a former Cistercian nunnery. Today it is a residence for women of the Protestant Lutheran faith (German: Damenstift) near the Lower Saxon town of Bad Bevensen and is managed by the Monastic Chamber of Hanover (Klosterkammer Hannover). The current director of the abbey (Äbtissin) is the art historian Dr Kristin Püttmann.

A founding legend ascribes the convent's origins to a lay brother called Johannes; the convent's history from its founding to the election of abbess Margaretha Puffen was formerly depicted in a cycle of 15 painted wooden boards, that were destroyed in the fire of 1781; the only surviving copy is the affix in Johann Ludolf Lyßman's Historische Nachrichten (1772). The legend has it that Johannes claimed divine guidance in his quest to build the new convent. The community was founded 1228 in Restorf am Höhbeck by Johannes and four nuns who joined him in Magdeburg, but the group did not stay there. For unknown reasons, they moved on to Plate near Lüchow and later Bohndorf, before they eventually settled in Altenmedingen, where the first buildings were consecrated on 24 August 1241.

The military road passing through the convent yard presented an ever-present danger of attacks or arson, so the convent decided to move one last time, to the village of Zellensen, today's Medingen. The new church was consecrated on 24 August 1336.

1479 saw the advent of the convent reforms under the influence of the devotio moderna. Many convents at that time did not follow the Cistercian rule very strictly; nuns were allowed to keep their belongings and keep in touch with their relatives once they joined the convent. The Cistercian order was re-established and the prioress Margarete Puffen was made an abbess in 1494. After the reforms, a scriptorium became one of the focal points of the convent and to this day a large number of manuscripts found worldwide can be attributed to the sixteenth-century nuns of Medingen. Hymns (Leisen) noted down in these texts are still part of both Catholic and Protestant hymnbooks today, e.g. in the current German Protestant hymnal Evangelisches Gesangbuch EG 23 "Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ", EG 100 "Wir wollen alle fröhlich sein" and EG 214 "Gott sei gelobet und gebenedeiet", even though they were wrongly dated to the 14th century by the music historian Walther Lipphardt.