Book storm
The book storm is used to describe the destruction of books during the Zurich Reformation in 1525. The spiritual institutes (monasteries and monasteries) were abolished and their books, especially the liturgical ones, destroyed.
prehistory
When Huldrych Zwingli took office as a folk priest at the Grossmünster Canon Monastery on January 1, 1519, reforms of the spiritual life began in Zurich. The city council steered the years of ferment with a sure hand. In 1523, the exclusion of the monks of the preacher's monastery ( Dominicans ) from pastoral care in the women's monastery in Oetenbach was important for the fate of the books ; In the following year 1524 the Lord's Supper was reformed, the mass abolished and the pictures removed from churches and monasteries, in December 1524 the monasteries were abolished and their property confiscated, monks and nuns were asked to convert to the secular class.
The remaining monks of the three mendicant monasteries (the preachers, the Augustinian hermits and the Barfüsser) were then placed in the Barfüsserkloster Zurich with the offer of lifelong residence , and the women's monasteries in Oetenbach and St. Verena were obliged to care for the sick and poor.
execution
The council resolutions make no mention of the books of the spiritual institutions. It can be assumed that books, like other movable goods, were given to those who remained loyal to their order and who had to emigrate. This resulted in a scattering of books that research can only partially trace back today. During this phase there was mainly a migration of valuable individual items and prayer books with illumination.
The majority of Zurich's spiritual libraries remained in place for the time being, albeit partly unattended and unprotected. The actual book elimination took place between September 17 and October 7, 1525. There are several eyewitness accounts.
On September 17th, the choir hymn books were removed from the Grossmünster and locked away by a council resolution, with the aim of making the liturgy (mass and times of day) impossible. In the following days the books were removed from the other churches and monasteries. A commission, consisting of Ulrich Zwingli, Leo Jud (pastor of St. Peter Zurich) and Heinrich Brennwald (provost of the Embrach monastery, then chairman of the alms in Zurich), ruled out the liturgical books as "useless". The chronicler and eyewitness Gerold Edlibach , himself not a supporter of the Reformation, reports: "This was a big hoof, all of which were sold, torn and dragged and none of them remained" (there was a large bunch of them, all of which were sold, torn and torn and none remained whole). The purpose of dividing the choral hymn books was to prevent their further use in the liturgy elsewhere.
In 1525, most of the liturgical book holdings and an indeterminable part of the other ecclesiastical books were scattered or destroyed in the city and landscape of Zurich. Parchment leaves were used by pharmacists and shopkeepers as bags of powder, goldsmiths used to make gold leaf and were thus destroyed. What was sold to bookbinders is still partly present as fragments in book bindings, but it is scattered in libraries near and far. In 1538 an unnamed printer in Zurich bought “shredded permentne song books” as raw material.
The scholar Conrad Pellikan (1478–1556) collected the remaining church books since 1531 in the Grossmünster. With the private library left by Ulrich Zwingli after his death in 1531, which bought the pen from the widow, Pellikan set up the reformed monastery library and cataloged its book holdings in book form. Based on this, most of the books at the time (manuscripts, incunabula and old prints) (74%) could be found and identified in the holdings of the Zurich Central Library. It follows that the book destruction mainly affected liturgical books.
Individual evidence
- ^ Gerold Edlibach : Notes on the Zurich Reformation 1520–1526. Autograph in the Zurich Central Library, manuscript department, Ms. L 104; Text edition by Peter Jezler in: Bilderstreit, Kulturwandel in Zwingli's Reformation. Edited by Hans-Dietrich Altendorf, Peter Jezler; Theologischer Verlag, Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-290-11555-0 , pp. 45–74, quotation p. 65.
- ↑ Anna Maria Stützle-Dobrowolska: What paper bindings pass on to us about the book treasures of the pre-Reformation Grossmünsterstift. In: Zürcher Taschenbuch 2014, Zurich 2013, pp. 57–100, ill.
- ↑ Martin Germann: The Reformed Abbey Library at the Grossmünster Zurich in the 16th century and the beginnings of the modern bibliography: Reconstruction of the book inventory and its origin, the book layout and the library room, with an edition of the library catalog from 1532/1551 by Conrad Pellikan. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1994 (= contributions to books and libraries ; 34), ISBN 3-447-03482-3 , pp. 103-108.