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Life in the Pauline Monasteries of Late Medieval Hungary

St. Paul the Hermit - Pauline OrderLife in the Pauline Monasteries of Late Medieval Hungary

Beatrix F. Romhányi

periodica polytechnica: Architecture, Research Article, December 15 (2012)

Abstract

The Pauline order emerged in the second half of the thirteenth century and became one of the most popular religious communities of medieval Hungary. Due to their mixed – hermitic, monastic and mendicant – character, their monasteries developed an economic system and a social network that was unique in the fifteenth and sixteenth-century kingdom. Their repudiation of higher education was coupled with the prestige of manual work and literary creativity. The main supporters of the order were members of the lesser nobility and the aristocracy.

Research on the Pauline order has always been a popular topic in Hungarian historiography between both professional and a large number of amateur researchers. Aside from the latter aspect, historians, archaeologists, art historians, literary historians and even architects such as the commemorated Tamás Guzsik have dealt with it since the beginning of the twentieth century up to the present. Although a seemingly complete history of the order could be written based on the sixteenth-century historical work of Gregorius Gyöngyösi, the number of reliable written sources has only developed from the second half of the fourteenth century; many aspects of the early history of the order still remain unclear. Archaeo- logical evidence is also primarily available for the late medieval period.

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