Klosterbibliotheken in der Frühen Neuzeit. Süddeutschland, Österreich, Schweiz ed. by Ernst Tremp (review)

This book makes available expanded versions of papers given at a symposium jointly organized by the Wolfenbütteler Arbeitskreis für Buch-, Bibliotheks- und Mediengeschichte and the Stiftsbibliothek St Gallen in April 2011, focusing on monastic libraries in southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in the early modern period. The fifteen contributions, all of them of absorbing interest, fall into five groups: two offering a general conspectus, six dealing with specific monasteries, three focusing on individual personalities, two on monasteries’ communication with a wider world, and two looking at censorship practices.

The volume opens with Alois Schmid’s excellent overview of the place of the library, both as a collection of books and — in the baroque period — as an often grand physical space, in monastic life, both within the individual institution and throughout a wider network. He emphasizes the influence of the French Jesuit Claudius Clement’s Musei sive bibliothecae extructio (Madrid, 1628; Lyon, 1635) for the wider theoretical underpinning of library provision in religious houses. Indeed, the Jesuits played a leading role, with the Benedictines, Cistercians, Augustinian Canons, and Premonstratensians following closely behind. Next, Hanspeter Marti casts a critical eye over the coverage of Swiss monastic libraries in the long-awaited three-volume Handbuch historischer Buchbestände in der Schweiz (Hildesheim, 2011) and in the Swiss government’s Schweizerisches Inventar der Kulturgüter von nationaler Bedeutung (Berne, 2010). In particular, he notes several omissions from the Handbuch, notably the music collection at Einsiedeln (2,000 manuscripts dating from before 1800, and 5,000 early printed books).

The next group comprises essays on the libraries of six Benedictine abbeys: Rheinau (Canton Zürich), founded c. 778; the German monasteries Reichenau (724) and St Peter in the Black Forest (1093); Einsiedeln (Canton Schwyz) (1130); Mariastein (Canton Solothurn) (1633 but with a much older antecedent); and Pfäfers (Canton St Gallen) (731). Each has a fascinating story to tell. The Rheinau abbot’s accounts contain interesting details of expenditure on books in the eighteenth century, not to mention that on frogs and snails (20 Gulden 56 Kreuzer) and alcohol (more than 7,560 Gulden!) in 1816. We hear how, at Reichenau, now a world heritage site, research into the manuscripts was lastingly stimulated by the desire of Bernhard Pez (1683–1735), librarian of the abbey at Melk in Lower Austria, to compile a literary history of the Benedictine Order. And we also learn how the Reichenau prior, Marcus Hummel, cleverly exploited the library holdings to revive the veneration of the relic of the Holy Blood in order to ameliorate the monks’ living conditions. As for St Peter in the Black Forest, though its holdings, built up in the eighteenth century, were dispersed when the house was secularized in 1806, projects recently put in hand at Freiburg University Library aim to recreate the library in virtual form (www.ub.uni-freiburg.de/go/sanktpeter).

The essay on Einsiedeln focuses on the role of particular abbots and librarians, but this abbey is of special interest because from 1664 to 1798 it operated its own press, producing some 1,100 books, including the works of two famous Capuchin priests, Martin von Cochem (1634–1712) and the composer-poet Laurentius von Schnifis (1633–1702). The library at Mariastein had a remarkable history: after despoliation at the time of the French Revolution, re-establishment in the early nineteenth century, and absorption into the Cantonal Library at Solothurn following the abbey’s dissolution in 1874, the books were eventually returned to the reestablished monastery in 1998. The history of the library at Pfäfers in the early modern period is a sorry tale of fire, neglect, lack of resources, and depredation. The neglect was caused not least by the abbey’s devoting its energies and resources to developing the local thermal baths. When the monastery was dissolved, in 1838, the library...