Suchergebnisse

Für die quantifizierende Geschichtsschreibung sind Inhaltsanalysen nur verwendbar, wenn die Daten durch einen Reduktionsprozeß zur elektronischen Datenverarbeitung vorbereitet werden. Der Autor stellt die unterschiedlichen Soft-Ware-Programme vor, die eine entsprechende Textverarbeitung ermöglichen. Schwächen und Möglichkeiten der einzelnen Systeme werden erläutert. Abschließend gibt der Autor einen Überblick über bisher in Projekten erfolgte quantitative Verarbeitung von Texten auf Basis einer Inhaltsanalyse. (BG)

This article is concerned with the reasons women in the late Middle Ages entered nunneries, with their family background and with their life conditions in the convents. The basis for the study are two Cistercian and one premonstratensian nunnery in Upper Hesse in the period from the 13th to the 16th Century. The main goal is to show a collective biography on the base of prosopographical research. The analysis of the biographies of 250 nuns, foundated on the investigation of the whole sourcematerial of the cloister- and family archives, shows the multifarious aspects of their life: the religious predestination on one side and the very close connections to the secular world on the other side. Especially since the 14th Century the life ofthe nuns began to become very worldy. They had a number of conflicts with Supervisors because of their disregard of the enclosure, their contacts with men, their fashionable cloths and other secular amusements. The study shows their mostly noble birth, the possession of privat property and the family politics, which determined a part of the children for monastic life because of family interests, as some reasons for their wishing to live just as their secular sisters and brothers. On the other hand the life in a nunnery was also - especially for noble women - a positiv and acceptable alternative to marriage because of the possibilities for an education, for forms of selfgovernment and for a chance to attain the only ecclesiastical offices of the Middle Ages opened to women.

Apart from classical ways of using narrative analysis in everyday communication as well as in linguistics and sociology (eh. 3) it is conceivable to detect the narrator's interest constellations (eh. 4) and a central stock of his general action capacities and specific institutional skills (eh. 2,5) by way of his retrospective interpretation in verbal off-hand narratives of his own past eonduct. His willingness to tell about personal experiences gets hirn into constraints to become more specific on the one hand, for if events are being told their respeetive consequences as new events have to be revealed etc. This constraint to become more specific brings up the narrator's former and partly (at the time of the narrative) still existent actual interest constellations, because those are motivating, constituting elements of the events to be told about. On the other hand personally experienced stories point at wider action contexts and interrelationships (due to their retrospective character), and the kind in which narrators take account of these action contexts and interrelationships reveals something about their different degrees of action capacities (eh. 1). Both questions are only legitimate if we have the pre-eondition of the sociological narrative analysis as proposed here: that the action contexts in the narrative are not just subjeetively or even fictiously self-experienced, but really accomplished. This pre-condition of sociological narrative analysis can be justified as a plausible imputation by the following aspect: As long as personally experienced stories are really told as off-hand narratives, the telling of them has to keep up the red line of temporal and causal linkage of past experiences in their respective relationship with the narrator, who at the same time is one of the central persons of action or at least of suffering in the story. In that respect telling those stories reproduces the existential conditions and orientations of the actual action system in important dimensions (except the layer of actual definitions of the situation) (eh. 1).