Monasticism has a special position in the history of pastoral care. It produced innovations in
various aspects of pastoral care despite or more precisely because of its isolation in legal
or social terms from the secular world. The thirteen papers contained in this volume will
reveal that there was a great variety in the ways pastoral care continued to be practised by
monasticism depending on time space and the nature of each religious order. Adopting a
comparative approach their historical and geographical range of investigation is not limited
to medieval Europe but expands to the Americas and even to Japan in the early Modern Age. This
volume bases on a conference held on 1 and 2 March 2019 at Okayama University Japan as part
of the close collaboration between a Japanese research group on Christian Buddhist religious
movements and the Research Project Monasteries in the High Middle Ages: Innovation Laboratories
for European Life Designs and Regulatory Models of the Saxon and the Heidelberg Academies of
Sciences and Humanities as well as the Research Center for Comparative History of Religious
Orders (FOVOG Dresden).
