Bursfelde Abbey - Bursfelde Congregation

See main article Bursfelde Congregation

Dederoth's successor, John of Hagen, obtained permission in 1445 from the Council of Basle to restore the Divine Office to the original form of the old Benedictine breviary and to introduce liturgical and disciplinary uniformity in the monasteries that followed the reform of Bursfelde. On 11 March 1446 the Cardinal Legate Louis d'Allemand approved the Bursfelde Union or Congregation, which then consisted of six abbeys: Bursfelde itself, Clus, Reinhausen, Cismar in Schleswig-Holstein, St. Jacob near Mainz, and Huysburg near Magdeburg. On 6 March 1458, Pope Pius II approved the statutes of the congregation.

The Bursfelde Congregation was a highly beneficial reforming influence on the spiritual life of the time in the Benedictine monasteries of Germany during the second half of the fifteenth, and the first half of the sixteenth, century. At the death of Abbot John of Hagen thirty-six monasteries had already joined the Bursfelde Congregation, and just before the Reformation, at least 136 abbeys, scattered through all parts of Germany, belonged to it. The efficacy of the Congregation was severely curtailed by the Reformation, during which many of its member houses were dissolved, but continued in a restricted form until the secularisations of the late 18th and early 19th centuries dissolved the surviving religious houses.