Catalogue of Manuscripts of the Innsbruck Servite Monastery

Cataloguing of manuscripts is a core discipline in the wide field of humanities. Its results are of great interest to various disciplines, like theology, art history, various philologies, history in its many variants, cultural studies or gender studies. The aim of this project is to catalogue 43 manuscripts, dating from 15th and 16th century, in the Library of the servite Monastery in Innsbruck. The Project applies the cataloguing rules set by the Commission for Paleography and Codicology of Medieval Manuscripts in Austria of Austrian Academy of Sciencies (Richtlinien und Terminologie für die Handschriftenbeschreibung, in: O. Mazal [Hg.]: Handschriftenbeschreibung in Österreich [Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Schrift- und Buchwesen des Mittelalters, Reihe II, Bd. 1], Wien 1975, 133-158).

The library of the OSM Monastery in Innsbruck (founded in 1616) today still contains ca. 380 bound and ca. 100 unbound manuscript volumes. In this project, the oldest 40 of those manuscripts, from the 15th and 16th centuries, were catalogued according to the rules of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The manuscripts from the 15th and 16th centuries are of high importance for the history of the Tyrolean libraries, as some of them came to the collection from other, partly secularized Tyrolean monasteries (two from Schnals and Rattenberg each, respectively one from Wilten, Stams, Volders and Waldrast). 22 Manuscripts belong to the 15th, 18 to the 16th century. The writing material was in 35 cases paper, in 5 cases parchment. 18 volumes contain only German texts, 18 only Latin, two contain Italian, two both German and Latin texts. Theology is the predominant topic in 20 manuscripts, medicine and natural sciences in five of them, and the rest of the texts are concerned with history, geography, law, liturgy, philosophy, pastoral literature and poetry.