In the course of the medieval eastward migrations of Germans Gebhard I, Count of Arnstein conquered the area around today's Lindow.

The nunnery's estates comprised 90,000 morgen of land, 18 villages, nine watermills and several fishponds and lakes (among others Großer Stechlinsee).

[3] The dues collected from the tenants of lands allowed to maintain 35 nuns, an abbess and a male provost, pastoring them and representing the nunnery in contracts with outsiders.

The prior function of the nunnery, to provide sustenance for unmarried women mostly from local noble families, wasn't to be given up with its secularisation.

So the formerly Roman Catholic nunnery turned into a Lutheran women's convent (German: das Stift, more particular: Fräuleinstift, literally damsels' foundation), with its inhabitants now called conventuals.

During the Thirty Years War, Danish as well as Imperial troops captured and robbed the town in 1627, while conventuals and townsfolk weathered that on Werder island in the Gudelacksee.

[8] The convent's library and the archives were destroyed by fire, the cloister school, built in the late 15th century, survived and is preserved until today.

A Reformed congregation, besides the existing belittled Lutheran, was established and Lindow used to be headed by two burgomasters at a time, one of each denomination.

[10] It shows an altarpiece "Noli me tangere" by Heinrich Stadler of 1771 depicting the resurrected Jesus of Nazareth appearing to Mary Magdalene.

[10] The matroneum opposite to the pulpit altar is still occasionally called the damsels' gallery (Fräuleinempore), where the conventuals used to sit during services.

The typical Protestant pulpit altar has a sand glass fixed on its parapet, donated by the congregation to a pastor in the 18th century in view of lengthy preaches in order to restrain them.

[10] In the first third of the 19th century Lindow became the seat of a Jewish congregation, which opened a cemetery in 1824 and a private synagogue, serving as a place of worship for the Jews living in diaspora in the surrounding villages.

Between September 1937 and the end of 1944 the SS organisation Lebensborn ran the home Kurmark in Klosterheide, a component village of Lindow north of the town.

She was a Protestant of Jewish descent, and lost her previous precarious protected status of a so-called privileged mixed marriage when her husband died.

[15] In the 1980s a local initiative renovated the enclosure walls and headstones of the Jewish cemetery, which had weathered the Nazi period untouched.