Cataloguing the Christian Oriental Manuscripts of Andechs Abbey

Located just outside Munich, Andechs Abbey owns a collection of oriental manuscripts that have remained largely unprocessed and have not been scientifically catalogued.

The core of the collection consists of over one hundred manuscripts acquired by the Franciscan priest Arsenius Rehm (1738-1808) in Cairo when he worked there as chaplain to the French legation from 1770 to 1776. Rehm, who was interested in the languages of the Orient, and later became a professor of Arabic at the University of Fulda for some time, brought the books back to his mother monastery on the Frauenberg in Fulda. The collection remained there, reduced only by a few copies donated to the Fulda City Library, until the middle of the 19^th century. It was then acquired in 1852 with the help of the Bavarian king by Bonifaz Haneberg (1816-1876) for the Benedictine monastery of St. Boniface in Munich. Haneberg, an extensively educated theologian and orientalist who had been appointed full professor of Biblical Languages and Exegesis of the Old Testament at the University of Munich in 1844, had joined St. Boniface in 1850, later becoming abbot of the monastery and eventually bishop of Speyer. Probably in the course of efforts to sell the collection, the Bonn-based orientalist Johann Gildemeister (1812-1890) had compiled a “Katalog der Rehm’schen Handschriften” in Fulda in October 1847, which, however, only has the character of a handlist and has remained unpublished. The catalogue contains 107 entries and was later supplemented with 25 additional entries by Haneberg, who himself travelled twice to the Orient and also acquired books and manuscripts there.

The bulk of the collection is made up of Muslim literature, mostly in Arabic, but also in Turkish and Persian. 31 manuscripts originate from the literary production of Oriental Christians. Here, too, works in Arabic predominate, but there are also texts in Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Persian and Turkish.

The Research Centre for the Christian East at the University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt has received permission from the abbot of the monastery of St. Boniface in Munich, to which Andechs Abbey also belongs, to scientifically process the Oriental Christian manuscripts. The goal of the project, which was begun in the fall of 2012, is the creation of a comprehensive catalogue that also takes into account the history of the holdings. To this end, the project team formed by Dr. Carsten Walbiner (Cairo/Eichstätt), Prof. Dr. Franz-Christoph Muth (Mainz/Eichstätt) and Prof. Dr. Hubert Kaufhold (Munich/Eichstätt) is working closely with the library and archives of the Monastery of St. Boniface, namely the monastery archivist Dr. Brigitta Klemenz.

Metadata on the manuscripts from the Rehm Collection can be viewed in the Qalamos Database [link: Qalamos] of the DFG project Orient-Digital.

Michaela Hoffmann-Ruf wrote the article "Eine Menge orientalischer Handschriften" an einem "unbekannten Ort" - Die Sammlung Rehm und ihre Geschichte on the blog of the DFG project Orient-Digital on the Rehm Collection.