Church regulations in practice on the example of chosen female monasteries of Czech lands at the turn of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era

The diploma thesis is devoted to the abbess focusing on her spiritual and secular duties, on the powers in the administration of the convent and in the care of the nunnery property at the turn of the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era. For describing the ideal conception of the post of the abbess the study uses legislative regulations of various levels: the statutes and rules of women's contemplative and mendicant religious orders as welll as the decrees of the Council of Trent. On the example of three selected women's monasteries of three different orders - the Benedictine convent of St. George at Prague Castle, the Cistercian nunnery in Pohled, the monastery of the Poor Clares in Panenský Týnec - illustrates how the real influence of the Mother Superior differs from the ideal one. The text is based on an exploration of the written archival materials of the monasteries, from which were selected individual cases, that illustrate what the abbess had to deal with. According to the regulations, the authority for solution disputes inside the convent should be the Prague Archbishop, the King of Bohemia and his officers on property matters, but the archival sources show that secular and ecclesiastical law was very often intertwined. The most frequent sources for the diploma thesis were letters written..