Dominikanerkloster Bad Wimpfen, Gothic church in Bad Wimpfen, Germany

The Dominican Church in Bad Wimpfen is a hall church with a 14-metre-wide nave and a narrow four-bay Gothic choir with a 5/8 polygonal close and tracery windows, completed in the early 14th century. The nave was raised by a window zone in 1713; its main portal was broken into the north wall in the 18th century, and the pointed arch of an older portal is still visible in the masonry. A stone slab in the middle of the nave covers a crypt used for burials from 1735 to 1807.

The Dominican order received the hilltop site southwest of the Wimpfen Pfalz from a donation by Engelhard von Weinsberg. The monastery chronicle of Joachim Brodt (1721) gives 1264 as the laying of the foundation stone, while an older cartulary names 1273 as the start of construction; the high altar was consecrated to the Holy Cross in 1269 by Albertus Magnus. The church reached its present ground plan with the completion of the choir in the early 14th century, and the nave was raised in 1713–1715.

The church has been a Catholic parish church dedicated to the Holy Cross since the monastery was dissolved in 1818. A cross relic, kept in a small metal cross set with four gemstones, has been venerated here since the 13th century; the pilgrimage to it began in 1719 on the Feast of the Finding of the Cross (3 May).

The main entrance is in the north wall, broken through during the 18th-century remodelling; elsewhere on that wall the pointed arch of an earlier portal is still visible in the masonry. The nave faces west toward rising ground where the town wall once ran, which is why the portal was placed on the north side. The former convent buildings, bought by the town in 1838, house schools.

The cross relic found in 1717 inside the old high altar had lain in a 13th-century lead capsule. It is a small metal cross set with four gemstones, holding a splinter of the cross of Jesus Christ. The first cross pilgrimage took place in 1719 on the Feast of the Finding of the Cross, 3 May.