Isenhagen

Isenhagen's Cistercian community entered the period after a fire had destroyed its buildings at Hankensbüttel in 1336. Construction at the present site near Emmen began in 1345. The convent's own history associates the interruption of vaulting work in 1349 with the plague; church and cloister consequently remained without their planned vaults. The east cloister was vaulted much later, in 1518, under Provost Burdian.

Religious change did not end the institution. Duke Ernst the Confessor introduced the Reformation in 1527, and in 1540 the nunnery became a Protestant women's foundation. Its buildings continued to change under the new confession: the south and west wings were rebuilt between 1723 and 1726. Isenhagen therefore preserves a local history of rebuilding, religious transformation and institutional survival, extending from the late medieval convent to the eighteenth-century foundation rather than ending with the dissolution of monastic life.