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Reviewed by:
  • Das Augustinerchorherrenstift Bernried
  • John B. Freed
Das Augustinerchorherrenstift Bernried. By Walburga Scherbaum. [Germania Sacra: Die Kirche des Alten Reiches und ihre Institutionen, Dritte Folge, 3: Die Bistümer der Kirchenprovinz Mainz, Das Bistum Augsburg 3.] (New York: Walter de Gruyter. 2011. Pp. xvi, 504. $225.00. ISBN 978-3-110-25182-1.)

There was an Augustinian canon bubble in twelfth-century Bavaria and Austria. Noble families like the Welfs, Babenbergs, Sulzbachs, and Weyarn-Falkensteins and such bishops as Conrad I of Salzburg (1106-47) and Hartmann of Brixen (1140-64), who were themselves Augustinian canons, founded collegiate churches to preserve their dynastic memories and/or to care for souls. Some such as Berchtesgaden—a Sulzbach foundation and princely provostry (Fürstpropstei), which possessed lucrative salt works—were wealthy, but Berchtesgaden's location in what is now a national park was probably more conducive to the contemplative than the active life. (The location helps to explain its notoriety in the twentieth century.) The still-functioning [End Page 355] house of Klosterneuburg, upstream from Vienna, benefited from its ties to its Babenberg benefactors and their Habsburg successors and the fact that the burial place of the patron saint of Austria, Margrave Leopold III, lay there. (The twelfth-century masterpiece, the altar of Nicholas of Verdun, where Leopold's bones rest, is a major tourist attraction today.) Other houses like Au and Gars on the Inn River—which owed their existence to a minor comital house, the Mödlings—were insignificant. Bernried, on the west bank of the Starnberger see, southwest of Munich, fell into the latter category.

The archives of Bernried, if they ever existed, do not survive; thus, we know virtually nothing about the church during the Middle Ages. (Bernried suffered from three major fires, and diocesan visitors and ducal officials criticized the later provosts for their poor record-keeping.) Both the village and the church, whose name means a place cleared by Bero, were mentioned for the first time in Pope Calixtus II's privilege of protection, which copyists dated November 12 in either 1122 or 1123. The pope granted Bernried Roman liberty, but not exemption, from the jurisdiction of the bishop of Augsburg. The founder was Count Otto I of Valley, a member of one branch of the house of Scheyern-Wittelsbach. Since Valley is situated on the Mangfall, a tributary of the Inn, we can only speculate why Otto chose a location distant from the heart of his power. Perhaps, it was too close to the rival foundation of Weyarn, but the site may have been part of his wife's inheritance. Moreover, Otto was an ally of the Welfs, who were the advocates of the nearby Augustinian houses of Polling and Rottenbuch, the latter, a major center for the dissemination of the Augustinian Rule. Bernried provided refuge in the early 1120s for a number of reformers, most notably Paul of Bernried (d. 1146/50), Pope Gregory VII's biographer, who had been forced to leave Regensburg. Paul procured Calixtus's privilege and wrote the vita of the seer Herluca (died c. 1128), who had been chased from Epfach on the Lech along with the hermit Sigebot, the first provost of Bernried. No cult developed around Herluca, but her example may have inspired the establishment of a convent of women at Bernried that was mentioned once in 1226. (Many of the Augustinian churches were double houses.) Upon the death of the last Valley in 1268, the Wittelsbach dukes of Bavaria acquired the advocacy.

Internal discipline declined in the thirteenth century; for example, a provost was killed around 1130, under unknown circumstances, by Bernried retainers. An effort was made to reform the church in the fifteenth century. The Reformation had minimal repercussions initially, but by 1572 only five canons lived in the house, and those who served as parish priests had concubines and children. Spanish troops who were quartered in Bernried in 1633-34 did considerable damage. After the Thirty Years War the Wittels-bachs assisted with reconstruction. The canons served as parish priests in twelve parishes and their chapels, but the income from the tithes did not cover the cost of maintaining the churches. In the...

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