Frankenthal scriptorium

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St. Jerome from the Frankenthal Bible

The Frankenthaler scriptorium , also Frankenthaler writing school , was a monastic writing room of the Middle Ages in Frankenthal (today Rhineland-Palatinate ). It had its seat in the Augustinian canons , today's Erkenbert ruins .

There are 26  manuscripts from the 12th century and 15  volumes , each with several manuscripts from the 15th and 16th centuries. The best-known work is the two-volume Frankenthal Bible , which is now in the British Library ( London ) under the signature Harley MS 2803 and 2804 .

Augustinian Abbey

The monastery was founded by Ministerial Erkenbert from the then episcopal city of Worms in 1119 on his country estate. This was in nearby Frankenthal, which belonged to the Electoral Palatinate as a town and later also as a town . The remains of the monastery and its collegiate church are now called the Erkenbert ruins.

Scriptorium

Clerk's note Nicolaus Numann (1501), times of the suffering of Christ and times of the day of Mary , Heidelberg, University Library, Cod. Pal. germ. 440, fol. 236r

As was common before the invention of printing with movable type, the books required for religious purposes in the Frankenthal scriptorium were also made by hand. The work was shared by specialized text writers and illuminators . It is not certain whether the scriptorium was set up when the monastery was founded or not until a few years later. The best-known manuscript that was created there, the Frankenthaler Bible, was started according to the dating in 1148. Because of this, at least the scriptorium cannot be much younger than the monastery itself.

Four of the surviving manuscripts are lavishly illustrated. The illumination by pen drawings is particularly remarkable by the so-called scribe A , who was active between 1148 and 1178. He also did paperwork on the Frankenthal Bible. About 64 different writers can be identified from the period up to 1200.

After that, the importance of the scriptorium decreased. No manuscripts from the 13th and 14th centuries have survived. Production only started again in the 15th century. From this second era 15 volumes have survived, each containing several individual manuscripts. One of the writers of this time was Nicolaus Numann , who also decorated some of the older works afterwards. He also made initials from three collections of incunabula .

The scriptorium existed until 1562 at the latest, when Elector Friedrich III. , after the Reformation had prevailed in the Electoral Palatinate , which had dissolved the Catholic Canon Monastery until then .

Whereabouts

With the dissolution of the scriptorium, the Frankenthal manuscripts came to the Bibliotheca Palatina in Heidelberg and from there to the Vatican library . There are still 30 manuscripts there today. Nine copies are kept in the Berlin State Library, the others in various European libraries.

literature

  • Aliza Cohen-Mushlin: The Twelfth-Century Scriptorium at Frankenthal . In: Linda L. Brown-Rigg (Ed.): Medieval Book Production. Assessing the evidence. Oxford, July 1988 (Proceedings of the ... conference of the Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Volume 2) . Anderson-Lovelace et al., Los Altos Hills CA 1990, ISBN 0-9626372-0-3 , pp. 85-101 .
  • Aliza Cohen-Mushlin: A Medieval Scriptorium. Sancta Maria Magdalena de Frankendal (Wolfenbüttel Medieval Studies 3) . Verlag Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1990, ISBN 3-447-03106-9 .
  • Vera Trost: Scriptorium. Book production in the Middle Ages . Verlag Belser, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-7630-1212-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edgar J. Hürkey: The Frankenthaler Bible - twelve images from the manuscript mss. Harley 2803-2804 in the British Library, London. Catalog. kunstportal-pfalz.de, 2001, accessed on October 1, 2016 .

Coordinates: 49 ° 32 ′ 7.3 "  N , 8 ° 21 ′ 18.3"  E