Modern Fight Over Ancient Library

It was filthy, cramped and in major disarray, but when art historian Eva Lindqvist Sandgren entered the library in Altomuenster Abbey, off-limits to all but the German monastery’s nuns for more than five centuries, she immediately knew she was looking at a major treasure. 

The dusty shelves held at least 500 books, by her estimate, including precious illuminated manuscripts from the 16th century, chants used by the uniquely women-led Bridgettine Order and processionals bursting with colorful religious and ornamental decoration in their margins. 

Unlike most Bridgettine libraries, the tomes had survived the Protestant Reformation, the 30 Years War and Germany’s “secularization,” when the state took most church property. It represents the most complete collection of the order known today.

“I had entered a time capsule,” said Lindqvist Sandgren, a senior lecturer at Sweden’s Uppsala University. 

Surprised by the spontaneous decision by Altomuenster’s last remaining nun, Sister Apollonia Buchinger, to open the library, 20 scholars including Sandgren made plans to return and meticulously catalog the remarkable collection. 

But before they could, the Vatican ordered the abbey in the Bavarian town of 7,500 closed and locked up the library, which also contains some 2,300 statues, paintings and other works of art.

If plans go ahead to close it down, all of the abbey’s property – the books, the artworks, the city-block-sized abbey, and the acres of forests and fields that make up the monastery grounds – would be turned over to the dioceses of Munich and Freising. 

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