Oberschönenfeld Abbey (Kloster Oberschönenfeld) is a
Cistercian nunnery
Cistercian nuns are female members of the Cistercian Order, a religious order belonging to the Roman Catholic branch of the Catholic Church.
History
The first Cistercian monastery for women, Le Tart Abbey, was established at Tart-l'Abbaye in t ...
As early as around 1186 there were Beguines, or a similar community of women, on this site. In about 1211 they formed a more structured community which by 1248, when the church was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, had been formally constituted as a Cistercian nunnery, accounted a daughter house of
Kaisheim Abbey
The Imperial Abbey of Kaisersheim (German:''Reichsstift Kaisersheim'' or ''Kloster Kaisersheim''), was a Cistercian monastery in Kaisersheim (now Kaisheim), Bavaria, Germany.
As one of the 40-odd self-ruling imperial abbeys of the Holy Roman Empi ...
Bishop of Augsburg
Diocese of Augsburg is a diocese of the Catholic Church in Germany. The diocese is a suffragan of the Archdiocese of Munich.Dillingen.
Between 1718 and 1721 the monastic buildings were reconstructed in their present
Baroque
The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...
form by the master builder
Franz Beer
Franz Beer (3 July 1659 – 19 January 1726), also known as Franz Beer von Blaichten, was an Austrian architect during the Baroque period, mainly working on church buildings at monasteries in southern Germany, chiefly in Upper Swabia, and Swit ...
, as was the church later.
Until 1803 the abbey exercised territorial lordship over the villages of Gessertshausen and Altenmünster.
In 1803 the abbey was dissolved in the course of the secularisation of Bavaria. The nuns were not expelled, however, and the nunnery was reopened in 1836 by King Ludwig I of Bavaria as a priory, which was made an abbey again in 1918.
In 1951 the first missionaries were sent to Brazil, where in 1963 they founded their own monastery in Itararé in the state of Sao Paulo.
Museums
In the stables, unused since 1972, the ''Bezirk Schwaben'' established the Swabian Folklore and Crafts Museum (''Schwäbisches Volkskundemuseum Oberschönenfeld; since 2018: Museum Oberschönenfeld'') in 1984. In 2003 the Swabian Gallery (for revolving exhibitions of art) was added.
Here are also the nature reserve house of the Augsburg-Western Woods Nature Reserve (''Naturpark Augsburg-Westliche Wälder'').