Published 1. 10. 2025

The City and the Friary – workshop for history teachers

The workshop “ The City and the Friary” will focus on how religious institutions contributed to the formation of early modern towns during the construction of a distinctly Catholic society in Central Europe after the Thirty Years’ War. It will concentrate specifically on the Franciscan order and its activities within urban society, using the example of Olomouc. The workshop will demonstrate how the ideal of life in poverty and dependence on alms shaped the functioning of the convent and its presence in the city, and it will explore how the friars established contact with the townspeople and what they offered in return for alms. Participants will work with specific examples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to examine how different types of sources (monastic chronicles, visual materials, account books, alms registers, maps, statutes, or religious literature) can be used not only for historical research but also for inquiry-based history teaching.