German medieval manuscripts in the Vatican Library I.

Research project P 13818 German mediaval manuscripts in the Vatican Library I Gerold HAYER 11.10.1999 The aim of this project is to publish a catalogue of the medieval manuscripts in German language beeing stored in the Vatican Library. Most of these mansucrips are unknown to scientifical research, because they are not yet recorded in modern catalogues. A first part of the project is devoted to the Biblioteca Rossiana. During the years 1838 and 1854 Giovanni Francesco de Rossi had collected more than onethousend medieval manuscripts for his private library; when he died, his widow made this precious collection a present to the Roman Jesuits. In 1873, when the Jesuits had to leave Rome, Rossis library came to Vienna, Austria. Emperor Franz Joseph I., who legally succeeded in the ownership of this library, commissioned the Viennese Jesuite order to open it for scientifical research. At that time (1902-1904) P. Josef Oberhammer compiled an inventory list of the manuscripts. This hand- written volume today is the only help to get a survey of this collection. It can only be used at the Vatican Library, where all the manuscripts were transferred after World War I. Oberhammer`s inventory list shows, that 55 manuscripts were written in German language. Most of them belong to the 15th century; they mostly contain religious tracts, but there are also historiographic texts and legistic treatises to be found, tracts about military and magic sciences. Until now all these manuscripts could not find any consideration in the different fields of medieval research, except for eight manuscripts, which are described in Tietze`s "Katalog der illuminierten Handschriften der Rossiana in Wien-Lainz" (Leipzig 1911). Methodically the description of the German manuscripts will follow the instructions given by the "Kommission für Schrift- und Buchwesen des Mittelalters" of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Having concluded this project, a following project intends to discribe and publish the German medieval manuscripts of another collection of Vatican Library, the "Codices Vaticani latini".

The library of the Roman bibliophile Giovanni Francesco de Rossi (+1854) containing approxymately 1200 manuscripts, 2500 incunabula and 5300 printed books bequeathed by him to the Jesuit order in Rome was put on display in 1921 at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. The puropse of the project was the creation of a scientific catalogue of the German language manuscripts in order to make them accessible to researchers of the medieval and early modern era. The earliest of the 54 manuscripts goes back to the end of the 14th Century and the youngest dates from 1830. More than half of the texts originated during the 15th Century and were written in the regions of Bavaria and Austria. The predominant part of the texts are of religious nature which allows the conclusion that they were originally owned by monasteries and other religious institutions. While we can find among the manuscripts examples of late medieval "bestsellers" of vernacular literature (e.g. Vitaspatrum, Der Heiligen Leben, Belial, Lucidarius, Gesta Romanorum, Bertholds Beichtsumme, Stephans of Landskron Himmelsstrasse, John Mandevill s Reise, Vocabularius ex quo), there is also no lack of important, rarely transmitted texts (e.g. Proverbia and Ecclesiastes of the Old Testament translated by the Austrian Bible Translator, and sermons by Johannes Bischoff and Augustin Frick). The small group of non-religious texts is limited mainly to modern era manuscripts (e.g. Schembartbuch, Nuernberger Geschlechterbuch, Christoph Scheurls Tucherbuch, Leonhard Fronspergers Feuerkunst- und Kriegsbuch, furthermore texts about magic, divination, exorcism, and alchimy). The catalogues outline follows the guideline of the Commission of paleography and codicology of medieval manuscripts by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and is accessible through several indexes.