Antje Willing, ed. Die Bibliothek des Klosters St. Katharina zu Nürnberg. Synoptische Darstellung der Bücherverzeichnisse. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012. 2 vol., 1517p. (vol. 1: cxiv, 844p.; vol. 2: vi, 674p.). ISBN 9783050055466. €248.00 / US $347.00 (hardback).
This substantial two-volume publication is the result of a research project, started in 2005 by Hartmut Kugler and taken over by his long-time collaborator Antje Willing in 2010, documenting the library of the Dominican nunnery of St. Catherine’s in Nuremberg. The convent was founded in 1295 and was brought to adopt observance in 1428 by the Alsatian monastery of Schönensteinbach. It soon became one of the centers of the Dominican reform in the province of Teutonia. After Nuremberg had adopted the reformation, the convent was prohibited from accepting new members and became extinct in 1525. While the buildings that afterwards had served as a rehearsal room for the Nuremberg Meistersinger and as a rallying ground during the revolution of 1848 were turned into ruins during an air raid in 1945, the library has survived largely undamaged as a part of the Nuremberg City Library. There are several factors that make the convent of particular interest to book historians. Its library is one of the largest documented convent libraries of the fifteenth century. This is complemented by a number of surviving library catalogues and two lectio-catalogues documenting the German texts that were invariably read at mealtimes.
In a roughly 100-page introduction, Willing explains the structure and makeup of the different library catalogues, the function and importance of the lectio-catalogues, and their dating. She writes about the role attributed to reading at mealtimes in the Augustinian rule and its Dominican interpretation, goes on to name the most important provenances of books at St. Catherine’s, sketches patterns of book transfers within the Dominican observance movement, and presents one peculiarity regarding book ownership: in addition to the other catalogues, there is also an inventory of the books that the sisters owned privately. This is one point for which – as Willing points out – the Nuremberg Dominicans must have obtained dispensation after the introduction of observance.
In the remainder of the work, Willing gives a synopsis of the surviving catalogues, which is cross-referenced with the surviving manuscripts, thereby reconstructing the library as far as possible and documenting 726 volumes – amongst them, 565 German and 161 Latin. For the surviving manuscripts she gives complete bibliographical information and references to relevant research, presented in a very user-friendly fashion. For the German texts, about half of the manuscripts seem to have survived; for the Latin manuscripts, there is no way to assess the survival rate, as the respective catalogue is lost.
A plan, mentioned by Willing in the preface, to present the database online on the pages of the Nuremberg City Library, could not be realized due to a lack of funding. Fortunately, the database has now found a home at the University of Jena and can be consulted at the following URL: http://db-st-katharina.vmguest.uni-jena.de. This is an extremely valuable addendum to Willing’s book. Apart from being kept up to date – at least until now – and the obvious advantages of a searchable database, it compensates for the otherwise deplorable absence of an index. Overall this project and the resulting edition are important contributions to the history of late medieval libraries and book culture in general, and of observant Dominican nunneries in particular.
Nikolaus Weichselbaumer
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
