| Summary: | During the Reformation, the Trzebnica Cistercian abbey experienced a deepening religious, social and economic crisis. The sharpest dimension of the breakdown of the role played by this center in the Church and the Silesian society was revealed in the weakening of the community and the disappearance of its board activity in favor of the strong rule of the abbess in the first half of the 16th century. Information about the first reforms in this area, combined with a change in the strategy of recruitment to the monastery, can be found in sources deriving from the period of Abbess Katarzyna Mutschelnitz. Beginning in the 1560s, the most important monastic functions passed into the hands of a new generation of nuns, some of whom had come from the Upper Silesian and Opole families who had recently settled in the Duchy of Oleśnica, or from Greater Poland families. The remaining nuns represented the local gentry of an earlier origin. This arrangement became the background of tensions caused mainly by the emperor’s policy aimed at filling monastic offices, especially the abbess office, for people subjected to the Czech Crown. The conflict over the election of the successor of Anna Jemiołowska in the last decade of the 16th century revealed the determination of the Cistercian nuns to defend their identity and the freedom of internal cloister reform.
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