Kempten Abbey, Benedictine monastery in Bavaria, Germany

Kempten Abbey is the former Benedictine monastery of Kempten in the Allgäu, whose centre is the princely residence and the St. Lorenz abbey church begun under Prince-Abbot Roman Giel of Gielsberg from 1651. The pale stone church has two tall towers with green domes, lanterns and crosses, a clock face, and a long body with a row of dark arched windows; smaller green-domed structures and steps lead to the entrance. The monastery complex now houses the Swabian district administration.

The monastery, dedicated to Mary, Gordian and Epimachus, was founded in 752 under Abbot Audogar and backed by Charlemagne's wife Hildegard and her son Louis the Pious. Imperial immediacy was confirmed by Henry IV in 1062, and the abbots took the title of prince-abbot in the 12th century. In 1213 Frederick II granted comital rights, and in 1218 ceded the secular protectorate, confirmed by Henry VII in 1224. A single vote in the Imperial Diet in 1548 crowned the abbey's rise to an imperial principality; it was dissolved in 1803.

The abbey church, St. Lorenz Basilica, was commissioned from 1651 by Prince-Abbot Roman Giel of Gielsberg and counts among the first major churches built in Germany after the Thirty Years' War. The abbey's territory held around 42,000 subjects when Bavaria annexed it in 1802. The imperial city of Kempten, Protestant from 1527, lay enclosed within the Catholic abbey's lands, and the two estates shared the same name.

The former abbey church, St. Lorenz Basilica, and the adjoining princely residence were built from 1651 for Prince-Abbot Roman Giel of Gielsberg after Swedish troops burned the monastery in 1632. The site now houses the District Administration Office of Swabia, so the courtyards and interiors are working offices rather than a museum; visitors see the twin-towered facade and domed towers from the surrounding streets and squares.

The abbey was the site of the last recorded witchcraft trial in the Holy Roman Empire, which took place in 1775 and involved a woman named Anna Maria Schwegelin. This case marked the end of a dark chapter in European legal history.