Münnerstadt Abbey

The Münnerstadt Monastery is an Augustinian (formerly Augustinian Hermits) monastery in Münnerstadt, Bavaria, in the Diocese of Würzburg.

The monastery, dedicated to St. Michael and St. Augustine, was founded in 1279 by the city of Münnerstadt. After severe devastation in the German Peasants' War, the monks had to flee to Würzburg, and the monastery stood empty until 1652. It was not dissolved during the secularization. The gymnasium, closed in 1803, was reopened in 1806. In 1895, the convent became the starting point for the re-establishment of the German Augustinian province by Father Pius Keller. In 2002, a wing for assisted living was created in a vacant part of the monastery, in cooperation with the Münnerstadt Juliusspital.

The Münnerstadt Monastery Library has one of the largest collections of Christian works in German, Latin, and Greek worldwide. It contains approximately 70,000 volumes of ecclesiastical and secular literature, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" from 1775 - thus "only" a pirated edition -, a first edition of Friedrich Schiller's "The Maid of Orleans", original editions of Martin Luther's pamphlets, or the oldest parchment from 1240 in Alemannic language. Father Leonhard Lochner was responsible for the reorganization of the current modern library starting in 1995.