Monasticism has a special position in the history of pastoral care. It produced innovations in various aspects of pastoral care despite, or more precisely, because of its isolation in legal or social terms from the secular world. The thirteen papers contained in this volume will reveal that there was a great variety in the ways pastoral care continued to be practised by monasticism, depending on time, space, and the nature of each religious order. Adopting a comparative approach, their historical and geographical range of investigation is not limited to medieval Europe but expands to the Americas and even to Japan in the early Modern Age. This volume bases on a conference held on 1 and 2 March 2019 at Okayama University, Japan, as part of the close collaboration between a Japanese research group on Christian/Buddhist religious movements and the Research Project "Monasteries in the High Middle Ages: Innovation Laboratories for European Life Designs and Regulatory Models" of the Saxon and the Heidelberg Academies of Sciences and Humanities, as well as the Research Center for Comparative History of Religious Orders (FOVOG, Dresden).

Monasticism has a special position in the history of pastoral care. It produced innovations in various aspects of pastoral care despite, or more precisely, because of its isolation in legal or social terms from the secular world. The thirteen papers contained in this volume will reveal that there was a great variety in the ways pastoral care continued to be practised by monasticism, depending on time, space, and the nature of each religious order. Adopting a comparative approach, their historical and geographical range of investigation is not limited to medieval Europe but expands to the Americas and even to Japan in the early Modern Age. This volume bases on a conference held on 1 and 2 March 2019 at Okayama University, Japan, as part of the close collaboration between a Japanese research group on Christian/Buddhist religious movements and the Research Project "Monasteries in the High Middle Ages: Innovation Laboratories for European Life Designs and Regulatory Models" of the Saxon and the Heidelberg Academies of Sciences and Humanities, as well as the Research Center for Comparative History of Religious Orders (FOVOG, Dresden).

Als grundlegendes Motiv christlicher Theologie und Frömmigkeitspraxis besitzt ‚Einsamkeit‘ eine bis in die Spätantike reichende Tradition. Doch erst ab dem 11. Jahrhundert ergriff die Suche nach religiöser Abgeschiedenheit nicht mehr nur einzelne Spitzenasketen, sondern aus ihr erwuchsen neue soziale Formationen, von denen sich einige als eremitische Orden etablieren konnten. Die religiösen Reformbewegungen enthielten die Idee der Weltflucht und mit ihr jene der geistlichen solitudo als monastisch-programmatisches Leitmotiv, welches in Kombination mit der gemeinschaftlichen Lebensform ein scheinbares Paradoxon erzeugte. Hier setzt die ideengeschichtlich orientierte Studie an und zeichnet am Beispiel der frühen Kamaldulenser, Kartäuser und Zisterzienser nach, wie hochmittelalterliche Reformtheologen diese Ambivalenz lösten. Dabei werden sowohl vielfältige Gedankenhorizonte als auch die Veränderungen der Semantik von ‚Einsamkeit‘ innerhalb monastischer Diskurse und Rezeptionsstränge thematisiert.