Image Copyright: Kloster Marienrode

Zisterzienserstraße
31139 Hildesheim / Marienrode

The monastery Marienrode near Hildesheim was fonded by the Hildesheim bishop Bertold I of Alvensleben at the former settlement Baccenrode (lat.: Novale Bacconis) on the 22. May 1125. 'Novale' means a arable land to be built on or already built on, like Neubruch, the first settler could have had the name Bacco. It was until 1259 an Augustine monastery and later a Cistercian monastery. The Cistercians gave the village the still used names Marienrode after bishop Johann I of Brakel banished the monks and nuns from the monastery 'Backenroth' due to moral decline in the year 1259. The Cistercian gave the monastery a new name: 'Monasterium Novalis santctae Mariae'. After the secularisation in 1806 the domain was aquired by the kingdom Westphalia under Jérôme Bonaparte in 1807. It was then leased out to the Calenberg court write Süllow and in 1811 purchased by the royal-Westphalian finance minister Carl August von Malchus (from 1813 onwards title Earl of Marienrode). After the battle of the nations near Leipzig Elector (later king) George III of Hanover awarded the domain to the lieutenant general and Head forester Carl Baron of Beaulieu-Marconnay in 1813. He was married since 1804 to Henriette Countess of Egloffstein (1774-1864). She and three daughters from her first marriage Caroline, Julie, Auguste, who belonged to the Weimar circle around Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lie in a joined grave near the western entrance to the former farmstead. The baron died in 1855. Then there were several different tenants. After the 2nd World War some of the outbuildings were used as accommodation for displaced people from Silesia and Eastern Prussia. Some lived there until the the monastery was newly founded.

Since the start of his tenure in 1983 the Hildesheim bishop Josef Homeyer made an effort to settle new monasteries in the diocese Hildesheim and so the monastery Marienrode was resettled with 10 Benedictine nuns from the abbey St. Hildegard in Eibingen on the 5. May 1988. The previous residents and tenants of the farmstead were urged to move out in 1986. In 1998 Marienrode became an independent priory; the monastery follows the Beuroner congregation.

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