Codex Edelini
The Codex Edelini is a list of goods of the Alsatian monastery Weissenburg , created by Abbot Edelin (ruled 1262 to 1293).
Since the monastery had lost a large part of its possessions since the 10th century, Edelin had an inventory of goods drawn up using older documents in order to prevent further loss of monastery goods and to regain those that had already been lost (according to the introduction to the Codex). The book itself is a volume 33 cm high and 22 cm wide and contains, in addition to 2 protective sheets each with liturgical texts at the beginning and at the end, 77 parchment sheets written on both sides, 69 of which are from the same hand from the end of the 13th century, the remaining sheets are partly blank, partly described later. Two solid wooden lids covered in pressed leather - on which you can see two labels with crossed crooks, keys and swords - have held the Codex together for over 700 years.
In terms of content, the Codex Edelini offers a summary of various older lists of goods and individual documents that follow neither a chronological nor a geographical order. The copyist presumably copied them in the order in which he found them in the monastery archives. That is why the question of the time from which the individual mentions come cannot be answered simply or uniformly. In addition, the Codex Edelini contains some other texts on the history of the monastery, for example on the so-called Salic church robbery .
fate
After the codex had been kept in the monastery archives for several centuries, the French Revolution brought it an eventful fate. The valuable monastery archive first came into the possession of the city of Wissembourg (1791) , which also marked the Codex Edelini with its seal "Municipalité de Wissembourg", which is still on the front cover of the book today. When Weißenburg was temporarily evacuated by the French revolutionary troops and occupied by the Austrians during the following war years at the end of 1793, the Bishop of Speyer (since 1546 the Bishop of Speyer was also provost of the Weissenburg Abbey) took advantage of the situation to save part of the archive, including the Codex Edelini, to be carried away from Weißenburg and brought to safety.
The advancing French troops seem to have succeeded in intercepting the transport, because when the entire area on the left bank of the Rhine came into the possession of France in 1797 and the French " Département du Mont Tonnerre " was established in Mainz , the archives from Speyer and with them came out Weißenburg originating in the newly created archive of this department. There the curator of the Mainz University Library , Franz Joseph Bodmann , who had access to the archive, acquired various old documents and books, including the Codex Edelini.
The Codex Edelini, together with other Weißenburg manuscripts, passed from Bodmann to another Mainz citizen, Franz Scheppler, who immortalized himself in it as the owner (albeit illegally, as the books were stolen from the department's archive). Scheppler went bankrupt in 1811, whereupon all his books were auctioned off. Here the traces of the Codex Edelini are lost for a short time, but as early as January 1814 it reappeared in Augsburg at a “book junk” (“caupo librorum”). There the lawyer and historian Christoph Friedrich Cotta acquired it together with three other Weißenburg manuscripts, which passed into the possession of his son Emil Cotta after his death in 1838. He sold it in 1841 for 50 guilders to the Historical Association of the Palatinate , based in Speyer . On his behalf, the historian Johann Kaspar Zeuss obtained a printed edition of the Codex Edelini and an older book of traditions under the title “Traditiones Possessionesque Wizenburgenses” the following year .
The codex, which is still the property of that association, has been on loan in the Speyer State Archives since 1921 , signature: F 2 No. 147.
literature
- Johann Caspar Zeuss (Ed.): Traditiones possessionesque Wizenburgenses: codices duo cum supplementis; impensis societatis historicae Palatinae . Speyer, 1842.
- Christoph Dette (Ed.): Liber possessionum Wizenburgensis. Reissued and annotated . Mainz, 1987 online . (Dette's work, however, shows some serious shortcomings)
swell
- ^ Anton Doll: The Possessiones Wizenburgenses and their new edition . In: Archive for Middle Rhine Church History . No. 41, 1989, pp. 437-466
- ^ Michael Gockel: Critical remarks on the new edition of the Liber possessionum Wizenburgensis . In: Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte No. 39, 1989, pp. 353-380