Sub-project: The Virtual Abbey Library of Saint Gall
January 2008 - December 2009
Status: Completed
Financed by: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (http://www.mellon.org/)
Description: As of the end of 2009, over 300 manuscripts written before the year 1000 and held by the Abbey Library of St. Gall had been made available on e-codices. The web application had also been further developed using the most up to date informatics tools, allowing users to gain access to the website database faster and more easily. Financial support for this sub-project was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (New York).
All Libraries and Collections
A copy of the 16 books of the Grammar of Priscian of Caesarea (Priscianus maior), written in Carolingian minuscule at the turn of the 8th to the 9th century, probably in northern Italy (Verona?). The manuscript came into the possession of the Abbey of St. Gall during the 9th century under Abbot Grimald.
Online Since: 12/23/2008
The Vocabularium of Salomon, a 1070-page long alphabetical encyclopedia from the Carolingian period, written in a variety of hands in about 900, probably not in the monastery of St. Gall. The work has not survived in its complete form (entries beginning with Aa through Ab and Y and Z are missing). Generally attributed by the Abbey of St. Gall's internal historiography to the learned Abbot Salomon (890-920), the work is probably based on a Liber Glossarum from the French Abbey of Corbie.
Online Since: 12/09/2008
The Abba-Ababus-Glossar in palimpsest form, one of the oldest manuscripts in the Abbey Library which survives in book form. This glossary, in which each Latin word is explained using another, was apparently written over older texts from the 5th century in the Cloister of Bobbio. The texts underneath, which vary in legibility, include fragments of the Psalms and of the book of Jeremiah from the Old Testament as well as extracts from works by the grammarian Donatus and the Roman poet Terence. Includes a miniature of a speaker in declamatory pose.
Online Since: 12/09/2008
Manuscript compilation with mainly historical content, written for the most part in Latin and German, mostly by Gall Kemli, the wandering monk of St. Gall († about 1481). The manuscript contains, among many other texts, the Benedictine Rule, Latin and German riddles and proverbs, the only known copy of a Middle Rheinish Passion play in German from the 14th century, and a sort of curriculum vitae of the scribe Kemli.
Online Since: 12/23/2008
An important copy, in manuscript historical terms, of the Rule of St. Basil the Great (church father; 329-379) in a Latin translation by church father Rufinius (about 345-410), produced in the cloister of St. Gall by many hands during the second half of the 9th century. In addition to two shorter texts, the manuscript also contains an excerpt from the work De institutis coenobiorum by John Cassian († 430/35).
Online Since: 12/23/2008
St. Gall Abbot Ulrich Rösch's (1462-1491) book of heraldry, containing 1,626 coats of arms of prominent people from the laity and the clergy, mostly from the southern region of Germany. This heraldic book was probably prepared in the Heidelberg workshop of Hans Ingeram for an unknown customer from the area between the Neckar River and the Upper Rhine. In the 1480s St. Gall Abbot Ulrich Rösch purchased the volume and had numerous coats of arms from Swiss and German border areas added in the back pages; these were drawn by Winterthur artist Hans Haggenberg. One of the most important heraldic record books of the 15th century.
Online Since: 12/23/2008
Book of heraldry by the universal scholar Aegidius Tschudi (1505-1572) of Glarus, produced at some point between 1530 and 1572. It contains more than 2,000 coats of arms of the aristocratic families of the Old Swiss Confederacy. Many of the coats of arms include genealogical explanations in Tschudi's hand.
Online Since: 12/23/2008
Travel diary ("Reisebuch") of Alsatian world traveler Georg Franz Müller (1646-1723). Müller was employed by the Dutch East India Company between 1669 and 1682 as a soldier in the Indonesian archipelago. In the "Reisebuch" he illustrated people, animals and plants that he encountered during his voyage (via South Africa) to Indonesia and his travels in Indonesia. He also composed simple, sometimes clumsy verses, about all these people, animals and plants, and wrote them out in his idiosyncratic, difficult to read script.
Online Since: 12/23/2008
Collected Fragments Volume I from the Abbey Library of St. Gall ("Veterum Fragmentorum manuscriptis codicibus detractorum collectio tomus primus"). The volume contains, among many varied single pages and fragmentary texts, fragments from the Aeneid and the Georgics by Vergil from the late 4th century which are significant to textual history (11 pages and 8 small strips), 17 smaller and larger bits of text from a pre-Vulgate Vetus-Latina version of the Gospels from the early 5th century, fragments of a copy of the comedies of Terence from the 10th century, documents from the 9th through 15th centuries, small fragments in Hebrewscript, and the "St. Galler Glauben und Beichte II" (formulas for shrift or confession, together with professions of faith from the 11th century). Pater Ildefons von Arx (1755-1833) assembled this composite volume in the year 1822 and dedicated it to his former supervisor, Abbey Librarian Pater Johann Nepomuk Hauntinger (1756-1823).
Online Since: 07/31/2009
Collected Fragments Volume II from the Abbey Library of St. Gall ("Veterum Fragmentorum manuscriptis codicibus detractorum collectio tomus II"). Among other texts, this volume contains 110 smaller and larger single leaves from the oldest Vulgate version of the Gospels, produced in northern Italy (Verona?) in about 410/420, fragments of Psalm manuscripts in Latin and in Greek from the 7th and the 10th centuries respectively, and a large number of Irish fragments from the Abbey Library dating from the 7th through the 9th century, including a picture portraying Matthew the Evangelist with his emblems (p. 418), a full-page decorated cross (p. 422) and a "Peccavimus" decorative initial (p. 426).
Online Since: 07/31/2009
The best critical manuscript register of the 18th century: the St. Gall Manuscript Catalog of librarian Pater Pius Kolb (1712-1762) in two volumes (together with Cod. Sang. 1401) from the years 1755/59. The front matter of this first volume consists of an account by Pius Kolb of his work with manuscripts and the first detailed account of the history of the Abbey Library of St. Gall. The manuscripts are ordered by subject area; this first volume contains individual manuscript listings, together with critical commentaries, for the Bibles, the Bible commentaries, the works of the church fathers, the works written by St. Gall authors, the Council records as well as the Rules of the Order and commentaries upon those Rules. In the back of the volume is a manuscript concordance indicating the previous and the new library signatures for each volume. This catalog was produced in conjunction with the application of a new library signature scheme to the manuscript collection.
Online Since: 12/23/2008
The second volume of the best critical manuscript register of the 18th century: the St. Gall Manuscript Catalog of librarian Pater Pius Kolb (1712-1762) in two volumes (together with Cod. Sang. 1400) from the years 1755/59. In this second volume Kolb describes and evaluates the liturgical, historical and hagiographic manuscripts, the legal, theological and philosophical manuscripts, and also the texts concerning medicine, sciences, rhetoric, poetics, and grammar. Following the evaluative portion are an alphabetical listing by author and an incomplete index indicating the pages on which information about the individual codices can be found.
Online Since: 12/23/2008