Pius Kolb

Pius Kolb (born October 4, 1712 in Füssen , † April 22, 1762 ) was the librarian of the St. Gallen monastery from 1748 to 1762 .

Life

Pius Kolb was the son of a baker from Füssen . There he seems to have attended the collegiate school in St. Mangen before he came to St. Gallen on September 26, 1725 as a descantist . Here he made his profession on September 14, 1731. On June 4, 1735 he became a subdeacon , on March 17, 1736 a deacon and priest on November 17, 1737. His primacy is recorded on November 30, 1737. From 1738 he was a preacher in St. Gallen and Bernhardzell . In order to be introduced to practical pastoral care, he was sent to Rorschach for 14 days to see pastor Father Aegidius there. Accompanied by a priest, this briefing took place from August 5, 1739.

After his return, Kolb became a child catechist or shadow pastor. The abbot confirmed him on April 30, 1740 in this office. On October 6, 1741, however, the abbot sent him to St. Johann . There he stayed as a teacher of Latin and German poetry. On December 9th, 1743 he was called home, only to receive the order the following day to go to Disentis as a grammar teacher , where he was going on December 15th. In July 1746 he first returned to St. Johann because his feet no longer wanted to swell. From October 21st he became a teacher of rhetoric - but only for a single student. When this student switched to poetry, he was appointed sub-librarian, and in 1756 librarian. In 1762 he died of emaciation.

Act

Thanks to Father Pius Kolb, not only did the library expand, but also the coin cabinet. He gained in-depth knowledge of the manuscripts, so that several works from the early and high Middle Ages reappeared under his hand . Pius Kolb also put together a catalog, which Franz Weidmann , a chronicler and successor to Kolb, praised with the following words: "His excellent manuscript index [is] the seeing eye and the guiding hand of every researcher of ancient times." Only the manuscripts that had been stolen by the people of Zurich in the course of the Second Villmerger War in 1712 could not be recovered. He accompanied his manuscripts to Rorschach when the library in St. Gallen was being rebuilt, where he stayed until he fell ill. a. Acquainted with the later famous abbot of St. Blasien, Abbot Martin Gerbert .

literature

• Gall Heer: Johannes Mabillon and the Swiss Benedictines. A contribution to the history of historical source research in the 17th and 18th centuries. St. Gallen 1938, pp. 303-304.
• Rudolf Henggeler : Profession book of the princely. Benedictine abbey of St. Gallus and Otmar in St. Gallen. Zug 1929, pp. 382-383.
• Franz Weidmann : History of the library of St. Gallen from its foundation around the year 830 up to 1841. Edited from the sources on the millennial jubilee. St. Gallen 1841, p. 163.

predecessor	Office	successor
Antonin Rüttimann	Librarian of St. Gallen 1748–1762	Ulrich Berchtold