In 1252 the nobleman Kuno von Feldbach, with the consent of his feudal lords, the Noble von Klingen, sold the castle of Feldbach together with the right of patronage over the chapel located there and the associated vineyard to the sorores in ponte, a beguine community in Constance.
After permission from their ordinarius, the bishop of Constance, to found the monastery, Magistra Sophia and her 20 non-regulated Constance sisters came to Feldbach in 1253/1254 and took possession of it. On March 1, 1254, the congregatio sanctimonialum in Felbach, i.e. a community of nuns in Feldbach, was documented for the first time. After the sisters had already received episcopal permission in 1253 to live according to the rule of the Cistercians, they were mentioned in 1256 as a monasterium in Velpach. Accordingly, in 1260/1262 they were incorporated into the order as nuns.
Thanks to able abbesses and the favor of the above-mentioned lords of Klingen, Feldbach Abbey soon acquired considerable and extensive property, for example the bailiwick and the church treasury of Hemmenhofen passed to them as early as 1282. The monastery succeeded in creating its own closed court system, whereby the abbesses became judges over various places and from then on belonged to the court of Lords in Thurgau.
In 1327 the Feldbach Convent was granted an indulgence, probably as a result of the construction of an early Gothic monastery church.
The monastic community consisted of choir women, lay sisters and so-called converses, with the latter existing in Feldbach for an unusually long time, namely until 1333. The choir women were made up primarily of women from the upper middle class and the lower nobility.
Feldbach Abbey survived the Reformation, as a result of which Mrs. Afra Schmid, hitherto prioress of the Cistercian Abbey of Magdenau, was called to Feldbach as abbess in 1549, leading the monastery to renewed prosperity. In 1720 the majority of the nuns (22 choir women and 8 lay sisters) came from Thurgau, the Catholic places, Swabia and Tyrol.
The thriving monastic community was able to e.g. 1764 renovate the church. The abbey was dissolved in 1848 by decision of the Great Council - like almost all monasteries in the canton - in the course of secularization and due to chronic financial difficulties in the canton, so that the monastery assets could be confiscated in favor of the canton. The Feldbach Altar was found in an outbuilding.
Due to the ban on using their church, the Feldbach nuns first moved to the Cistercian nuns in the Tänikon monastery, which was also closed. In 1853 the remaining Feldbach nuns (5 choir women and 4 lay sisters) moved to Mammern and finally to Gwiggen, where they founded the convent of the combined Thurgau abbeys Feldbach, Kalchrain and Tänikon. The last Feldbach abbess, Maria Augustina Fröhlich, became the founding abbess of the new monastery.
The Feldbach monastery buildings burned down almost completely in 1895 due to improper, industrial and negligent use by the Gegauf Brothers company. The old monastery, which today serves as part of a hotel, has been preserved.
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