Liebenau monastery

The Liebenau monastery stands in Worms-Hochheim, a district of Worms in Rheinland-Pfalz. It was a Dominican nunnery founded outside the old city gates. The site lies near the Pfrimm river and the Von-Steuben-Straße bridge. Streets named Engelmannstraße and Holderbaumstraße recall its founders, Johann Engelmann and Lieba Holderbaum. The monastery once owned land in a dozen nearby villages. Its history reaches back to the early 14th century.

The monastery is worth the journey because of its noble connections. Irmengard of Oettingen, widow of Count Palatine Adolph, entered the convent in 1347 and lived there for more than forty years. Her daughter-in-law Beatrice of Aragon-Sicily gave birth to Rupert, later King of the Germans, who was raised at Liebenau until he was seven. Margaret of the Palatinate, a disabled daughter of Elector Louis III, became a lay sister and died in 1466. The reformer Petrus von Gengenbach brought nuns from Colmar to renew observance in 1430.

Visitors find quiet remains of the former nunnery in today’s district. The original church and cloister have disappeared, but the memory lives on in street names and local records. The area still feels like a place where history settled after centuries of change. A walk along the Pfrimm reveals the old bridge and the flat lands where the monastery once held fields. The nearby St. Cyriacus abbey in Neuhausen, with its relics of one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, adds to the sense of a once-great religious landscape.