Rescues at the Last Second

The Journeys of Cod. theol. 1565

Katrin Janz-Wenig

Lesen Sie hier die deutsche Version dieses Texts.

The manuscript with the shelfmark Cod. theol. 1565 in its present form is an object of the early 18th century. Its journey and its return to us are spectacular. Indeed, the volume has a story to tell, as appropriately allegorised by the Latin proverb Habent sua fata libelli – Books have their fate. In this case, the word libellus (pl. libelli) is not only to be understood as book, but also as a smaller format, quite in the ancient sense, literally as booklet, notebook, loosely folded sheet of paper.

The codex is a fragment and consists of a main part with additions of various layers and individual leaves of other manuscript parts, most of them younger. The main part of this breviary was probably written in the scriptorium of the Cologne monastery of St Pantaleon. At the time this part was written, at the end of the 12th century, the monastery had a productive scriptorium. A hardly legible owner’s entry on one page of the main part of the manuscript as well as the script and the decoration indicate that the manuscript is attributed to Cologne. A breviary is a so-called liturgical manuscript that contains texts and chants for the celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours. All the parts added in this manuscript transmit sections from other breviary manuscripts. Codicological analysis, that is, the precise study of the material composition and structure of the manuscript, is extremely difficult: the total of 28 quires in the volume come from at least four different manuscript fragments that were bound together without any particular regard for the usual order of prayers in the annual cycle. The other fragments date from the 13th and 14th centuries.

How did this tangled structure of the manuscript come about?

It is not possible to reconstruct the history of the individual parts of the manuscript, but there are indications of how it came to its present form in the 18th century. The enthusiastic collector of manuscripts and books, Zacharias Konrad von Uffenbach (1683–1734), who possessed one of the most voluminous private libraries of his time, made considerable acquisitions on his travels and at the book fairs that took place regularly at that time, also in his home town of Frankfurt. His biographer, Johann Georg Schelhorn, reports how in 1704 and 1718, at the famous book fair, Uffenbach saved pieces he considered valuable from final destruction. Uffenbach acquired a large part of the parchment leaves on each of the various occasions, reassembled them as best he could, and had them rebound as they still exist today. The codex in the exhibition is an example for this.

Excerpt from the three-volume Uffenbach biography *Herrn Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach Merkwürdige Reisen durch Niedersachsen Holland und Engelland* by J.G. Schelhorn from 1753-1754, in which he also reports on the episode at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Uffenbach’s manuscripts were acquired in several batches, primarily by the brothers Johann Christoph Wolf (1683–1739) and Johann Christian Wolf (1690–1770) from Hamburg. The manuscripts arrived at the City Library, the predecessor institution of the SUB, through their testamentary dispositions.

During the Second World War, the most valuable holdings of the State Library were evacuated to various locations. Some of the manuscripts were kept in castles in the Ore Mountains and near Dresden, where they survived the turbulence of the war. If they had not already been safe before the great attack on Hamburg, the so-called Operation Gomorrah, in the summer of 1943, they would have met a fate similar to that of the majority of the old prints, which were destroyed in a direct hit on the State Library. After the war, the Hamburg manuscripts were brought via Berlin to St Petersburg, where they were probably first collected until 1946 and then distributed to different Soviet republics. Our manuscript arrived in Yerevan (Armenia) in 1946 or 1947. After the Iron Curtain came down, there were several returnings of holdings, the last in 1998 from Yerevan, among which was Cod. theol. 1565. Since then, the exhibited manuscript has been back in the possession of the SUB and is currently being scientifically catalogued together with other manuscripts that were once displaced due to the war and have now been returned.

Exlibris of Zacharias Konrad von Uffenbach (Cod. theol. 1061)

Bibliography

KRAWEHL, Otto-Ernst / NEUBACHER, Jürgen (1999): ‚Rückgabe kriegsbedingt verlagerter Handschriften und Drucke der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky aus Tiflis (1996) und Eriwan (1998)‘. In: Auskunft 19, S. 133–145.
KRAWEHL, Otto-Ernst (1997): ‚Verlagert - verschollen - zum Teil restituiert. Das Schicksal der im 2. Weltkrieg ausgelagerten Bestände der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg‘. In: Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte, 83, S. 237–277.
STORK, Hans-Walter (2005): ‚Handschriften aus dem Kölner Pantaleonskloster in Hamburg. Beobachtungen zu Text und künstlerischer Ausstattung‘. In: Heinz Finger (ed.): Mittelalterliche Handschriften der Kölner Dombibliothek (Erstes Symposion der Diözesan- und Dombibliothek Köln zu den Dom-Manuskripten). Köln, S. 259–285.