The Library as Text

Before long, libraries as places of concentrated reading will have disappeared. Even today we can hardly guess at the way they were offering room for work and inspiration in the past: places of coexistence of texts that exist not within the same book but in the same room, thus being correlated in a productive way. Our project intends to reconstruct the manuscript collection of the Benedictine monastery Kremsmünster as such a place. In regard to methodology, this will be accomplished in the form of a dynamic collection history, developed on the basis of a recording of the 108 Kremsmünster manuscripts that contain German-language texts; they constitute in fact an exceptionally large and homogeneous inventory. The classical type of collection history presents provenience proofs for such historical funds, but fails to depict the fact that each book new to a medieval collection encountered books already existing there which were, in turn, never finished products. The manuscripts were in fact further worked on, the understanding of the earlier inventory was subject to permanent change a process that left traces. An example: In Kremsmünster exist sensationally early fragments of minnesang, `usually` surviving merely in lay manuscripts of a late date. Similarly to these late lay manuscripts that correlate texts of different periods within the room of a codex, in the room of the Kremsmünster collection of codices the library becomes itself text. Besides lays, also courtly narrative literature is represented at Kremsmünster, featuring the earliest textual witness of `Iwein`. Thus, incomparably to any other collecting place, an early interest in a new wordly literature comes to concentrate here, in a literature that represented a curiosity within monastery walls and made, outside of them, its way onto parchment but much later. This singularly concentrated event of coming-to-script leads, however, to a continuous interest in worldly lays, to a handling of worldly literature that is constantly varying, finally to an interest mostly antiquarian and, in the modern era, to a scholarly fascination with the German-language texts kept at Kremsmünster until today. Such connections are elaborated on the basis of sound manuscript descriptions that make part of a history of production and collection arranged according to time-cuts. Acting as an exemplary model, the project is meant to demonstrate how to describe historical manuscript collections in the way of cross-linked, dynamical cultural factors, thus correlating in a productive manner empirically sound manuscript cataloguing and topical issues about the textuality of medieval literature, as discussed in Cultural Sciences. Starting from philological recording, hence cultivation of an important cultural heritage, a dynamic Cultural Sciences project is developed that can be expected to constitute a piece of vital intellectual history.

The Stiftsbibliothek Kremsmünster owns more than 400 medieval manuscripts in which we can find approximately 140 German-language texts. Many of these texts were found through the projects work. The spectrum is enormous: There are short Federproben and marginal notices, singular verses and whole songs, historical notices, German prayers, preaches, exempla, edifying literature, courtly texts, German calendars and recipes, etc. But not all of these texts were written in Kremsmünster. A large part came later to the Stiftsbibliothek for example as a effect of acquisitions, donations or as a form of inheritage. These acquisitions and disposals not only occurred in the Middle Ages, the process of give and take still continues. The collection of books is changing permanently. A catalogue or manuscript descriptions cannot describe these dynamic processes. An adequate means is to describe the collection at particular moments on a random basis. These selected historical time periods (Zeitschnitte) are defined by important events in the history of Kremsmünster, by radical changes in the production of books and (especially) German texts. The selected historical time periods (Zeitschnitte) can help to analyse the book inventory of Kremsmünster as a whole, but also the German manuscripts and the profile of the collection at a specific time period. This means to write a library history of Kremsmünster in a dynamic way.