What similarities can be found between voluntary confinement in a monastery and forced imprisonment? How have the various approaches to incarceration and punishment systems characteristic of medieval monastic communities been adopted by modern penitentiaries? What conclusions can be drawn from comparing the experiences of Western and Eastern Europe? The authors of this German-Russian-French collection seek answers to these questions. The first part is devoted to monasteries as multifunctional places of detention, the second to the integration of prisons into urban space, and the third to discourses and practices of incarceration in various chronological, national, and institutional contexts. The works presented in the collection do not form a history of progress from the Dark Ages to enlightened modernity: instead, the authors analyze individual spaces and patterns of behavior, comparing the Russian experience with that of Western Europe and finding unexpected similarities between them.