History
The site was originally called Au (Latin: Augia, English: meadow), then Minderau (Augia Minor, lesser meadow), and finally Weissenau (Augia Alba or Candida, white meadow). The monastery was founded in 1145 by Gebizo of Ravensburg, a ministerialis of the Welfs, and his sister Luitgarde. Its first monks and their provost Herman (1145–75) came from Rot an der Rot Abbey near Memmingen. The monastery buildings were completed in 1156, and in 1172 the church was dedicated to Our Lady and Saint Peter by Otto, Bishop of Konstanz, to whose diocese it then belonged. During the first few years of its existence it had a nunnery attached, but this was transferred to Weissenthal nearby by Provost Herman, where it continued and existed there until the 15th century.
The number of canons at Weissenau increased so rapidly that in 1183 the newly founded monastery of Schussenried Abbey was recruited from there. In 1257 Weissenau was raised to the rank of an abbey, with Henry I (1257–66) as its first abbot. It was granted the status of an "Imperial abbey" (i.e., territorially independent) about this time.
In the 13th and 14th centuries, Weissenau was repeatedly pillaged by warring factions. Its most severe trial came during the German Peasants' War, when the canons were temporarily driven out and the abbot, Jacob Murer (1523–33), was replaced by the peasant Johann Wetzel.
Abbot Leopold Mauch (1704–22) began the rebuilding of the abbey in 1708 and of the church in 1717. The church, which is in the Baroque style, was completed in 1724 by his successor, Michael Helmling (1722–24), and the monastic buildings by Anton Unold (1724–65), of which the "Festsaal", still used for concerts, is of particular note for its elaborate stucco work.
At the time of its secularisation in 1802, it had 27 canons, who administered the parishes of Weissenau, St. Jodock, Bodnegg, Grünkraut, Thaldorf, St. Christian, Gornhofen, Obereschach and Obereisenbach. Its possessions comprised 198 estates and its jurisdiction extended over 137 villages. In all, Weissenau had eight provosts and 41 abbots. Its last abbot, Bonaventure Brem (1794–1802), died on 4 August 1818.
After secularisation the former abbey became the property of the Count of Sternberg-Manderscheid, upon whose death it was bought by the government of Württemberg in 1835, but partly resold and turned into a dressmaking and bleaching concern which continued in operation in parts of the outlying premises until 2006. Since 1892, the principal buildings have been used as an asylum for the insane, the present psychiatric clinic "Die Weissenau", which also occupied the former abbots' summer residence at Rahlenhof until recently.
Read more about this topic: Weissenau Abbey
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)