Archbishop's Academic Library Paderborn

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The Archbishop's Academic Library Paderborn is a German church library. It is the library of the Paderborn Theological Faculty and the diocesan library for the Archdiocese of Paderborn . Since August 1, 2016, the director has been the art historian and graduate theologian Hans-Walter Stork , succeeding Hermann-Josef Schmalor .

history

The forerunners of today's library are the library of the Paderborn Cathedral Monastery , which was built for the cathedral school shortly after it was built in 799. The oldest surviving book in the library, a parchment manuscript , dates to around 840 and comes from the library of the Benedictine Abbey of Corvey on the Weser.

The holdings of the cathedral school in turn formed the basis for the college library founded by the Jesuits in 1604 , from which the library of the newly founded Paderborn University (now the Paderborn Theological Faculty) emerged in 1614 . After the dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773, the university library became the library of the Philosophical-Theological Institute and the grammar school.

Between 1874 and 1887, as a result of secularization and disputes between the Catholic Church and the Prussian state, the cooperation between the state grammar school and the church teaching institution was terminated. The school was closed and teaching was only resumed in 1887 as the Philosophical-Theological Academy . Based on the previous experience, the professors began to build up their own books from private funds. This, together with the holdings of the seminary and the theological convict founded in 1895, formed the Episcopal Academic Library from 1896 , which was connected to scientific lending in 1902. Old stocks that had remained in the library of the state grammar school could be recovered until 1929.

In 1930 the diocese of Paderborn became an archbishopric, so it was also renamed the Archbishop's Academic Library Paderborn . The library suffered losses due to the two world wars. Due to the Versailles contracts, part of the holdings had to be given to the University Library in Leuven . In March 1945, about half of the existing holdings were destroyed in a bomb attack and the library building was badly damaged.

Duration

The current inventory comprises around 300,000 volumes (as of 2007). This includes 750 incunabula , 1,100 manuscripts , of which around 140 are medieval, 3,500 documents from the 12th to 18th centuries, 450 cards, mainly from the 17th to 19th centuries, and 7,000 volumes of canonization processes . Particularly noteworthy in the incunabula inventory are half a parchment sheet from a Gutenberg Bible and a complete Low German Cologne Bible from 1477/78. The manuscript collection begins with the so-called Corveyer Evangeliar , which was written around the year 840, and ends with the Abdinghof Gradual , which was created in 1507 in the Paderborn Benedictine monastery. In addition, the Archbishop's Academic Library Paderborn is the depository of the Archives of the Association for History and Antiquity of Westphalia, Dept. Paderborn eV .

literature

  • Karl Hengst : On the history of the academic library in Paderborn . In: Theologie und Glaube 80 (1990), pp. 379-390.
  • Series of publications by the Archbishop's Academic Library Paderborn

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Working group of Catholic-Theological Libraries: Successor in Paderborn , accessed on October 17, 2019

Coordinates: 51 ° 42 ′ 51.1 ″  N , 8 ° 45 ′ 18.9 ″  E