St. Annen-Kloster, Augustinian monastery in Old City Lübeck, Germany.
St Anne Cloister is an Augustinian monastery in Lübeck's Old City center with several preserved rooms including a refectory, chapter house, and sacristy arranged around a central courtyard. The complex now houses a museum with medieval sculptures, altar panels, and artworks from Northern Germany spanning the medieval period through the Classical era.
The foundation stone was laid on 20 August 1502 under Bishop Dietrich II. Arndes, and the late Gothic convent and church, designed by Vinzenz Sisinnius Hesse of Braunschweig, were ready for occupation by 1515. After the Reformation the convent closed; in 1532 seven nuns returned to the mother house at Steterburg, and the last four left in 1542. From 1601 the buildings served as a combined almshouse and workhouse, and in 1843 the church and the so-called Kinderhof burned out.
The convent was dedicated to Saint Anne, a saint especially venerated around 1500, on the proposal of Bishop Dietrich II. Arndes. The coats of arms of the founding Lübeck councillors and merchants, among them Berend Bomhover, Thomas von Wickede and Godart Wigerinck, are mounted on the consoles of the chapter house's rib vault, with their names painted on a scroll beside them.
The complex stands in the southeastern old town, near the Aegidienkirche and beside the synagogue. The former convent rooms and church are now the Museum Quarter St. Annen, so visiting means walking through the converted monastic spaces. The church interior was gutted by the 1843 fire, and the 1778 Spinnhaus wing was added on previously unbuilt ground.
The 1843 fire destroyed the so-called Kinderhof and the church, which had been squeezed between the other buildings. The church had already served as a storehouse after the secularisation, before the rooms became an almshouse in 1601. The monastery's two surviving prayer books were written by its own nuns.
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