Michaeliskonvent

The Michaeliskonvent stands in Lübeck’s old town near St Aegidii church. It began in 1397 when Berthold Segeberg bought a corner plot in Aegidienstraße and Weberstraße to house poor women under a rule dedicated to the archangel Michael. By 1451 a new building rose with help from Bishop Nikolaus II Sachau, welcoming sisters of the Devotio moderna movement. The community grew to fifty women, led by a Meisterin and twelve officiariae, spinning and weaving wool cloth for their living. They copied manuscripts and taught girls, while their grey wool habits earned them the name ‘Wollschwestern’. After the Reformation in 1531 the site became an almshouse, then a workhouse, and finally part of the Aegidienhof residential scheme. The convent’s greatest legacy is its library of about one hundred volumes now kept in Lübeck’s city library. These include a 284-folio Sammelband with Vitae patrum and Freidank sayings, early copies of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi, and two Memorienbücher from 1463 and 1498. Other volumes reached Hamburg and Harvard, showing how the sisters spread religious texts across northern Germany. Wall and ceiling paintings from the 17th and 19th centuries survive in fragments inside the house. Nearby, the St Annen Museum displays two altarpieces once used in the convent: a late 15th-century Vierzehn-Nothelfer-Altar and a small Annen-Schrein, plus a Madonna panel by Hermen Rode. Visitors walk through the corner building in St-Annen-Straße and see the restored Staffelgiebel added in 1720. Inside, traces of painted decoration remain on walls and ceilings. The St Annen Museum holds the altars and the painted Madonna with the kneeling donor, Hinrich Lipperade. A small wooden reliquary also survives from the sisters’ time. The site links the quiet lanes of Lübeck’s eastern quarter with the city’s medieval book culture and the daily life of these wool-spinning sisters.