Patronage, Reform, and Prayer: Female Religious Communities in Late Medieval and Early Modern Munich

This dissertation focuses on Munich’s three most prominent female religious communities and the unique ways that they became embedded into the life of the city in the late medieval and early modern periods. This project traces three major themes. First, it seeks to uncover the ways that the relationship between Munich and its convents was unique. The religious landscape of medieval Munich has received very little scholarly attention, despite the fact that an unusual relationship between the patrician elites and small communities of religious laywomen developed there. Second, this dissertation seeks to gain a fuller understanding of female religious life by discussing the Angerkloster, a traditional monastic community, alongside two semi-religious communities, the Pu¨trichkloster and the Ridlerkloster. This comparative approach allows for insight into the different roles played by different types of religious institutions in the urban landscape. Finally, the dissertation discusses the role that reform played in transforming the relationship between Munich and its convents. These communities each underwent two “reformations” over the course of the centuries, one in the 1480s and the second in 1621. The stories of these reforms, and the varying degrees of success that the women had in resisting these reforms, were intimately linked to the connections they had to external sources of money, legitimacy, and power.