Incarceration was one of the ways in which religious who had committed a crime were punished. In this paper the focus will be firstly on the monastic prison of Groenendaal. This monastery, situated in the Sonian Forest in Belgium, formed since 1413 part of the Congregation of Windesheim, a branch of the Augustinian order.
The starting point is to investigate what the rule of Augustine has to say about wrongdoing and punishment, and in how far it could be considered to subscribe to solitary confinement as a punishment. Next, not only the prescriptions laid down in the Constitutions and the Statutes of Windesheim, but also the decisions of the general and provincial chapters provide us with information about which offenders faced incarceration. Some individual cases will be presented of those who received a poena carceralis from the 16th to the 18th c.
No separate set of directives can be found within the Congregation of Windesheim of how criminal law should be implemented and how a litigation should be properly conducted. In contrast, the Capuchin order relatively quickly laid down a blueprint for criminal processes in its Modus procedendi (1593) of which only the provincial was allowed to possess a copy. A brief history will be given of this manual and an explanation will be offered as to why the Capuchin order wanted to provide such strict guidelines for litigations.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 