OrderBackgroundRheinau Abbey's Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts |
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History of Rheinau Abbey Library Founded according to tradition in 778, first documented in 844, the Benedictine Abbey of Rheinau was dissolved in 1799, restored under the authority of the Canton of Zurich in 1803, and again dissolved in 1862 by the Cantonal Council. The legislature decided on 20 March 1863 to hand over the twelve thousand volumes in the Abbey Library to the Cantonal Library, the forerunner of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich. The majority of these were printed books, along with 215 medieval parchments and 230 early modern paper manuscripts. Other paper manuscripts ended up in the library of Einsiedeln Abbey. Inventory Thanks to the catalogue compiled by Basilius Germann (1727-1794) we know precisely what manuscripts the library held in the eighteenth century (see Ms. Rh. hist. 112 and 113). The catalogue ends with Ms. Rh. 164; shelf marks 165-193 were purchased by the Abbey later, including the Rheinau Psalter, Ms. Rh. 167. Germann’s successor, Blasius Hauntinger (1762-1826), brother of the better known librarian of St. Gallen Abbey, Johannes Nepomuk, bought this famous manuscript at an auction in Schaffhausen in 1817. Germann’s catalogues, with their very accurate codicological references, remain the basis for scholarly research into Rheinau’s medieval library even today. The extant codices reflect a well-equipped monastic library, whose main focus by its nature is on liturgy and theology, with missals, psalters, writings of the church fathers, monastic rules, and prayer books. Until 1864, when the books were moved to Zurich, they adorned the baroque library, built between 1711 and 1717 in the north-east wing of the Abbey. The well-lit room with its white stucco work evidently enticed the librarians to colour the spines of the books black and stamp the shelf marks in gold, entirely in keeping with the ‘total art work’ nature of a baroque library. Masterpieces Among the Rheinau manuscripts from the Middle Ages a few parchment codices of European importance stand out, such as the Reichenau Verbrüderungsbuch (confraternity book, Ms. Rh. hist. 27), which the enterprising Father Moritz Hohenbaum van der Meer brought to Rheinau in 1787 on loan from the library of Reichenau. Also from the important Reichenau Abbey are two folios from an Ottonian sacramentary (Ms. Rh. 75) and the earliest extant floor plan of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (Ms. Rh. 73). Among the illuminated manuscripts are a gradual dating from circa 1200, Ms. Rh. 14, and its companion piece, Ms. Rh. 29. The Rheinau Psalter of around 1250 (Ms. Rh. 167) is one of the masterpieces of High Gothic art. The Weltchronik of Rudolf von Ems (Ms. Rh. 15) was produced a hundred years later, possibly in Zurich, as a late offshoot of the Manesse style. Late flourishing Rheinau experienced a late flourishing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – a swansong, as it were, before its dissolution, which began in 1836 with a ban on the admission of novices. In 1778 Moritz Hohenbaum van der Meer had a Kurze Geschichte des Klosters Rheinau (a sort of quintessence of his historical miscellanies preserved in 38 folio volumes in Einsiedeln) printed by Johannes Matthias Mieth, the Fürstenberg court printer in Donaueschingen. Christoph Eggenberger, Zentralbibliothek Zürich |
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