Alte St.-Aegidii-Kirche

St. Aegidii was a medieval parish and convent church in Münster, standing near the south-west gate of the Domburg by the junction of Aegidii and Johannis streets. Founded in the late 12th century as a Zistercian nunnery, it became the city’s first parish church dedicated to St Giles. The complex stretched westwards to the river Aa, including living quarters, workshops and a shared cemetery with the parish. The church witnessed key moments in Münster’s religious history. In 1533 a Lutheran councillor interrupted a Täufer preacher in the nave, sparking a disturbance that led to the church’s temporary closure. Later the same year the building suffered damage during the Täufer unrest. After the bishop’s troops retook the city, the convent was fined 350 gold florins, a sum reflecting the scale of the Täufer’s influence there. In 1588 two canons murdered a knight inside the church, an act that tested the city’s fragile balance of secular and ecclesiastical justice. Visitors today find the Aegidiimarkt on the site, a modern building complex covering the church’s foundations. The old cemetery once lay to the south, where nuns and priests were buried close to the choir. Though the church itself vanished in 1821, its memory lives on in street names and the surviving Taufstein by Albert Reininck, now preserved elsewhere.