Sub-project: Mellon 2011-2012
January 2011 - December 2012
Status: Completed
Financed by: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (http://www.mellon.org/)
Description: Further support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has enabled us to realize three key aims by the end of 2012: sustainability, interoperability and content. Safeguarding sustainability had main priority. The aim is to create a business model on which the basic operations of e-codices can be conducted without support from grant providers beginning in the year 2013. Expansion of interoperability involves the linkage of e-codices with various portals and the addition of specialized user tools. Content expansions involves presentation of an additional 100 manuscripts from a variety of libraries in Switzerland.
All Libraries and Collections
Copies of Augustine’s sermons 46 and 47 as well as his De baptismo contra Donatistas (important to textual history), De peccatorum meritis et de baptismo parvulorum ad Marcellinam, De unico baptismo contra Petilianum ad Constantium (important to textual history) and De spiritu et littera.
Online Since: 10/04/2011
A copy of an anonymous commentary on the first and second books of Exodus. The codex was produced during the 11th century, possibly at the Abbey of St. Gall.
Online Since: 10/04/2011
Antiphonary from the XIIIth century containing chants for the liturgy of the Hours. The melodies are noted using neumes without lines. Essentially, this is a copy of Cod. Sang. 390/391 (“Hartker antiphonary”) completed by saint’s days added after the completion of the Hartker antiphonary.
Online Since: 12/19/2011
The manuscript contains principally the chants for the liturgy of the Hours (response and antiphones), and also some chants of the Ordinary (in a part with tropes), hymns, and sequences, and spiritual chants in Latin and German. In all, six chants (p. 87-89, 103, 107) are for two or three voices. In this case, the voices are not noted one under another, but one after another. The spiritual chants are written with a mensural notation, and the other liturgical pieces in German plainsong notation, the so-called German “Hufnagelnotation”.
Online Since: 12/19/2011
Breviary with nightly recitations for Matins (lectiones matutinales) for the hourly prayers of the monks of St. Gall. Includes De tempore recitations (for the major holiday seasons of Christmas, Easter, and Pentacost, beginning with the first Sunday of Advent), and De sanctis recitations (for saints’ feast days).
Online Since: 12/19/2011
This rather hefty tome (weighing nearly 17 Kilos) compiled around 1200 contains copies in Latin of major works of world-, church- and ethnic history; examples include the History of the World by Orosius, the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius of Caesarea, the Summa of Biblical history (Historica Scholastica) of the early Parisian scholastic Peter Comestor († ca. 1179), the history of the first crusade by Robert of Reims, the history of the Langobards by Paulus Diaconus, the History of the English Church and People by the Venerable Bede, and Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne.
Online Since: 10/04/2011
The Cantonal Secretary of Schwyz Hans Fründ († 1469), originally from Luzern, wrote a chronicle of the Old Zurich War in about 1447. This carefully written copy illustrated with the flags of the cantons of the Confederation was made by Rorschach chaplain and former Schwyz schoolmaster Melchior Rupp in the year 1476. The manuscript, in the final pages of which are transcribed certain records and documents from the years 1446 through 1450 related to the Old Zurich War, made its way into the possession of Glarus scholar Aegidius Tchudi (1505-1572) and from there, in the year 1768, into the Abbey Library of St. Gall.
Online Since: 12/19/2011
This ecclesiastical law manuscript contains a collection of papal decretals generally known as the Breviarium extravagantium or Compilatio prima, compiled by Bernhard of Pavia, the first decretalist, in about 1189-1190. In addition to older glosses of unspecified origin, on some pages next to the two columns of the Textus inclusus there are extracts taken from the first review of a set of glosses by Tankred of Bologna, which he issued in about 1210-1215. The text, the initials, and the glosses date from the end of the 12th century or possibly the beginning of the 13th century in France.
Online Since: 12/19/2011
This manuscript of predominantly scholastic texts from the area of the University of Paris is bound in a well-preserved original Kopert (limp vellum) binding. Among others it contains an alphabetical register of the Sentences of Peter Lombard; the 14th century library catalog of the Cistercian Abbey of Heiligenkreuz in Lower Austria, preserved only in this manuscript (pp. 107-112); the work Quaestiones parvorum librorum naturalium by the French philosopher and logician Jean Buridan (Johannes Buridanus; † shortly after 1358), completed in August 1374 and correspondent to Aristotle’s writings (Parva naturalia) (pp. 121-253); as well as the text Collectio errorum in Anglia et Parisiis condemnatorum (pp. 254-264).
Online Since: 12/20/2012
This composite volume, written between 1425 and 1425 in the Lake Constance regions, though not at the Abbey of St. Gall, contains Latin versions of a great many computistic/astronomical/cosmographical treatises, including the widely disseminated work De sphaera mundi by John of Sacrobosco and his arithmetical foundation work Tractatus de algorismo. The manuscript, organized according to the calendar, also contains illustrations: the twelve signs of the zodiac, a map of the winds, sketches of the ecliptics of the sun and moon, planets and constellations, a diagrammatic guide for bloodletting, a set of early medieval Terra Orbis-type world maps, and (on pages 265 and 266) twelve simple illustrations for the months with brief rhyming proverbs in German derived from the nature- and landscape-dominated everyday life of the people of the late middle ages.
Online Since: 10/04/2011
This codex consists of four independently produced parts, probably not written in St. Gall: 1. Horace, Odae (incomplete at the end, with some glosses); 2. Lucan, Pharsalia (incomplete at the end, heavily glossed; 3. Sallust, De coniuratione Catilinae (complete) and De bello Iugurthino (with some chapters missing); 4. Ovid, Amores (incomplete at the end, heavily glossed) and a page from the Metamorphoseon.
Online Since: 03/31/2011
This manuscript from 1467, which first belonged to the convent of the Poor Clares at Freiburg in Breisgau and was transported to the Abbey of St. Gall in 1699, contains, in addition to some Latin texts, many tracts for spiritual instruction in German translation. These include an Ars moriendi, the Cordiale de quattuor novissimis by Gerard van Vliederhoven, the so-called Hieronymus-Briefe(Letters of Jerome) translated by John of Neumark (ca. 1315-1356), the Spiegelbuch, a dialogical text in rhymed verses on living life properly, the trials of worldly life and everyday tribulations, with about twenty colored pen sketches, and a version of the legend of the Three Kings by John of Hildesheim (1310/1320-1375). The manuscript also contains some additional pen sketches: a unicorn (p. 87), images representing two Apostles (p. 107; Paul and John?), a man and a woman in secular dress, and a stag and a wild boar (p. 513). There are imprints in Carolingian minuscule on front and rear inside covers (rear inside cover: Hrabanus Maurus, De computo).
Online Since: 10/04/2011
An important copy, in terms of textual history, of the Reformatio Prediger Ordens by the Dominican Johannes Meyer (1422-1482) of Basel. This copy originated in the Dominican cloister of St. Katharina in St. Gall, written in 1483 by Sister Elisabeth Muntprat (1459-1531). This work, which was copied from a model belonging to the cloister of St. Katherine in Nurnberg, is a valuable source for the history of the Dominican order in the German speaking world.
Online Since: 12/19/2011
A collection of religious writings from the Dominican cloister of St. Katherina in St. Gall, written in the second half of the 15th century by the hand of an experienced woman scribe. The volume transmits a great number of sermon texts in versions important to textual history. It contains, among other things, seven so-called Engelberger Predigten, the oldest copy of Version B of the work De Nabuchodonosor by Marquard of Lindau († 1392), ten sermons by Johannes Tauler († 1361), an account of the life, works, and miracles of St. Dominic taken from the work Der Heiligen Leben, a tract attributed to Meister Eckhart: Vom klösterlichen Leben, and religious epigrams.
Online Since: 12/19/2011
This Engelberg codex, currently held in Carinthia, typifies the painstaking yet unostentatious method of manuscript production practiced under Abbot Frowin (1143-1178), to whom the volume is dedicated on 1r. At the beginnings of the primary texts are indications for planned initials (1v, 103v), or completed initials in red and black ink (2r), with incipits in red ink. Otherwise there is little book decoration other than a few decorative capitals (including the one at the beginning of the last text on 145r). The artful application of patches to damaged sections of the parchment, typical for Engelberg, is also evident (18, 59, 62, 141, 154).
Online Since: 07/04/2012
This papyrus fragment contains 29 lines in uncial script, without spacing between words, written in the late 7th or early 8th century. The text includes a portion of Augustine’s homily 351 (c. 3.6: … agitur in stadio sumus …; cf. PL 39, col. 1542 to c. 4.7: … exserat seueritatem suam, cf. PL 39, col. 1543). This single sheet was originally part of a volume of at least 30 quires, containing homilies and letters by Augustine. Surviving quires are: 4-11 (containing 63 sheets + 1 sheet) and 24-30 (53 sheets), the former currently constituting Paris, BnF lat. 11641, the latter Bibliothèque de Genève, lat. 16. This particular sheet was originally the second bifolium in the 8th quire (Quinio), and would properly take its place between f. 26 and f. 27 in Paris BnF 11641. The marginalia on the verso side were made by the hand of Florus of Lyon († ca. 860).
Online Since: 07/04/2012
A facsimile has been published with the title Vom Einfluß der Gestirne auf die Gesundheit und den Charakter des Menschen, emphasizing the most important, astrological aspect of the work. Human beings and the cosmos are closely connected, and the seven planets – Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury and the moon – have an immediate effect on people. The manuscript, richly decorated with pictures, was commissioned by Erasmus and Dorothea Schurstab from Nuremberg (1v donation picture with coat of arms and depiction of the Crucifixion on a gold background). In 1774 Johann Jakob Zoller from Baden donated the manuscript to the City Library of Zürich, which was founded in 1629.
Online Since: 06/09/2011
The present Codex contains the complete text of the Dialogus (ca. 1110–1120) of Petrus Alfonsi, a converted Jew from Huesca (since 1096 Kingdom of Aragon). The Dialogus is a polemic and apologetic work, introducing (for the time) innovative, in view of the author «rational» argumentation against Jewish religion and Islam. The work spread quickly and had significant influence on Christian polemics especially in the 13th and 14th century.
Online Since: 03/22/2012
In its first part, the parchment manuscript contains the text that has been named, on the basis of its outstanding cycle of illustrations, the Aurora consurgens. The manuscript also contains numerous other alchemical treatises, for ex. Albertus Magnus on Secreta Hermetis philosophi, Johannes de Garlandia (John of Garland), excerpts from Geber (Jabir ibn Hayyan), the Thesaurus philosophiae and the Visio Arislei. Nine other Aurora-manuscripts are currently known to exist: Berlin Die uffgehnde Morgenrödte, Bologna, Glasgow, Leiden, Vienna, Paris, Prague and Venice. The Berlin manuscript, dating from the early sixteenth century and containing the illustrations as well as the texts in German translation, is closely related to the Zürich Codex.
Online Since: 06/09/2011
This codex contains a rare illuminated manuscript constituted entirely by illuminated pages, for each of which only a succinct caption is given, most often only a line of text, and which therefore provides exceptional historical image-sources for numerous domains. The pictures presented here of military technology were perhaps originally part of a medieval house book. A typical collector’s item, this illuminated manuscript underscores the collection character of the Rheinau conventual library, whose librarians and abbots were expressly on the lookout for rare books.
Online Since: 06/09/2011