Katalog der mittelalterlichen Handschriften des Stiftes Nonnberg in Salzburg

This academic catalogue provides access for the first time to the medieval manuscripts and fragments preserved in the Benedictine Convent of Nonnberg in Salzburg, which was founded in the early 8th century. The current holdings of the library encompass a relatively small collection of medieval works, with 108 manuscripts and 125 fragments from the early 9th to the middle of the 16th century. The library of Nonnberg holds, compared to other monasteries, very few complete manuscripts written in Latin, all of them with exclusively liturgical content. Breviaries, psalters and litanies as well as processionals, antiphonals and hymnals are represented. Also, the collection of fragments, all of which but one are in Latin, consists mainly of liturgical texts. Themes of a religious nature form the topics of all the manuscripts in German. Alongside a large number of prayer books, the vernacular manuscripts range from passages from the Bible (the epistles of Paul, the Gospels), accounts of the life of Christ and the passion, the exegesis of the Rule of Saint Benedict and acts of the saints to devotional stories, sermons, catechetical, ascetic and mystical texts. In contrast to the codices which were once in the possession of the monastery but are now in Munich and in American libraries, the remaining ones at Nonnberg are mainly paper manuscripts designated for everyday use and completely devoid of any representative character. While, in general, rubrications are the only ornamentations found in most of the manuscripts, some miniatures of higher quality depicting saints can be found occasionally in prayer books as well as woodcuts and engravings in 16th-century codices.