Towards a Protestant monasticism: The convent life expressed in the evangelical church orders of 16th century Germany

Convent life in the Holy Roman Empire prior to the Reformation was quite varied. It included convents of monks, nuns, canons, canonesses, beguines and other people living in some form of intentional religious community. Beginning In the 1520's the cities and territories that adopted the Reformation began regulating not only the secular parishes within their jurisdictions but also the convents by means of laws known as church orders.;Though, in many of the cities and two of the larger territories, convents were quickly dissolved and their property was transferred to other institutions, in most territories, convents were either phased out over time or allowed to continue indefinitely, but now as Evangelical institutions, that is, convents conformed to Reformation teaching.;The church orders that conformed the convents to Reformation teaching were the product of rulers and their advisers. Each order is not a unique effort, however. Wording was borrowed from the reformers and shared among the territories and cities. The orders are the product of an intellectual community covering all the German-speaking lands.;The reformers provided a critique of convent life. The public writings of the Wittenberg reformers reject convent life principally because its practices---obligatory vows, prayers, habits and diet---were understood to earn justifying merit and thus contradict justification by faith alone. Those of the Swiss reformers reject convent life primarily because it divided the Christian community. However, Luther and Calvin did admit that religious community life, including vows of a sort, could be conformed to Reformation doctrine.;Comparison of the 16th Century church orders regulating convents with the writings of the reformers reveals not only the influence of the reformers in these laws, but also the interests of those who formulated and issued the orders. In the church orders we find that these practical interests---as well as accompanying assumptions about gender---shaped Evangelical convent life as much as did the theology of the reformers. By contrast, both the reformers and the orders passed over any benefit of religious community life as an end in itself.