An academic workshop entitled “The Influence of Religious Orders on Societies – A Comparison between the Holy Roman Empire and the Croatian Historical Lands” was held in Dresden, Germany, on 15 and 16 June.

The workshop was organised as part of the research project ROSE – Religious Orders and Societies Entangled: The Examples of the Croatian Historical Lands and the Holy Roman Empire. The project is funded by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Youth (MZOM) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and is conducted in collaboration between the Faculty of Croatian Studies and the Research Centre for Comparative History of Religious Orders (FOVOG) at Technische Universität Dresden.

The Croatian project coordinators are Associate Professor Marko Jerković, PhD, and Associate Professor Lucija Krešić Nacevski, PhD, both members of the Department of Croatian Latinity.

Other Croatian participants in the workshop included external project collaborators Associate Professor Daniel Patafta, PhD (Catholic Faculty of Theology), and Petar Bilobrk, PhD (Institute for Migration Research), as well as Mariela Markić, a graduate student of History and Philosophy at the Faculty of Croatian Studies.

The project examines the role of religious orders and their interactions with society in pre-modern Europe, with particular emphasis on the Croatian historical lands and German territories. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, it explores how different religious orders developed, how they influenced the communities around them, and how these communities, in turn, shaped the religious orders themselves.

The project encompasses the study of both well-known and less extensively researched religious orders, the organisation of workshops and educational activities in Zagreb and Dresden, and the preparation of a teaching handbook intended for use at Croatian and German universities.

This third workshop organised within the framework of the project focused on networking, mobility and social interaction between religious orders and wider communities, as well as the influence of monasteries on the development of the cultural characteristics of Croatian and German regions.

Participants also explored opportunities for further teaching collaboration between the two partner institutions. It was agreed that guest lectures would be organised as early as the following year, enabling German scholars to deliver lectures in Croatia and Croatian scholars to lecture in Germany.