Arma spiritualia. Bibliotheken, Bucher, und Bildung im Deutschen Orden (review)

The 'Deutscher Orden', generally called the Order of Teutonic Knights in English, grew out of a hospital community founded outside Acre in 1190, was converted into a military order, initially following the rule of the Templars, and consisted of knights, priests, and lay brothers committed to supporting the crusade against the infidel (initially in the Holy Land, later in the eastern territories) and to caritative work. After the fall of Acre in 1291 activities were transferred from Outremer to Prussia and Livonia, where the order had been active since the 1230s and had established the 'Deutschordensstaat', the administration of which came to dominate their affairs. The knights suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Polish-Lithuanian alliance at the battle of Tannenberg in 1410 and their lands were secularized in 1525.

This monograph is devoted to the quite remarkable book culture of the Teutonic Knights during the Middle Ages, which had to serve in particular the needs of lay brethren from noble families who lived in monastery-like communities, with liturgical and spiritual obligations, reading at meal times, and also a multitude of administrative duties that involved a good deal of book-keeping, which in turn accounts for the mentality that has provided us with inventories, book lists, and library catalogues. Their best-known writings are vernacular texts in verse for readings, and the question of their literacy, the manifold sources for which are exhaustively treated by Mentzel-Reuters, is an interesting analogue to that of the communities of nuns in the mendicant orders; from an educational point of view, like the nuns, they were mostly laymen, but in terms of their profession, also like nuns, they belonged to the clerical world.

The main sections of the book are devoted to the history of the order (which is necessary as background), the religious formation and education of the brothers (which includes a very valuable discussion of literacy), readings at table, the relative status of Latin and vernacular books, and schooling; then a discussion of provision made for books in the statutes, the different types of libraries (pp. 144–80: in the houses of the order, in cathedral chapters incorporated into the order, in hospitals, in parish churches, and in private libraries), and finally an analysis of the surviving data for individual libraries, providing a full analysis of the sources.

Although the Teutonic Knights had numerous houses or 'Kommenden' in the central German lands, for example at Beuggen in Switzerland and at Ulm and Schweinfurt in Germany, most of their holdings were to the east of the present-day German borders, stretching through northern Poland into the Baltic states. The systematic presentation of the books and libraries (pp. 209–382), which will provide an indispensable reference work for all future studies, is arranged by province, taking the reader on a tour of Pommerelen (including Gdańsk), Kulm (modern Chełmno, including Toruń), Pomerania (including the Marienburg, now Malbork), Ermland (with Elbląg), Sarmland (with Königsberg / Kaliningrad and Tapiau / Gvardeysk), Livonia, Franconia (with Rothenburg ob der Tauber), Marburg-Hessen (with its centre at Marburg), Thuringia, and Bohemia and Moravia. Just to list these places, and to decide on the names to use, raises questions about the history of the region and the significance of the past for the present (and that worst century of all, the twentieth), and it is a marked feature of Mentzel-Reuter's study that while recognizing the importance of the 'Deutschordensstaat' as an integral part of German history, his presentation of the book history of the order, for which he uses a (limited) number of Polish sources, is at the same time a contribution to Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian history. But the language of names remains a problem...