The Plan of St. Gall :: :: University of Virginia Library

ONE of the most remarkable facts about the Plan of St. Gall is that it still exists and that it is still at St. Gall. Aside
from the length of time that has elapsed since the days it was first made, there were several specific dangers that
threatened its existence even after it was incorporated into the Library of St. Gall, such as the sack of the Magyars in
926, in expectation of which all the books were evacuated to the monastery of Reichenau,[1] and the stormy days of
secularization at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth which spelled disaster to so
many other monastic libraries.

In addition to these external dangers there were those created by the Plan's unusual shape. Being a sheet of
parchment of unwieldy proportions it was subject to the same hazards of housekeeping that tend to beset all holdings
that do not fit neatly into a normal shelving system. That the Plan survived at all under these circumstances must be
credited—as Johannes Duft has correctly pointed out[2] —to an unknown monk of St. Gall who, at the close of the
twelfth century, availed himself of the unused back portions of the skin to inscribe upon it the text of a Life of
St. Martin. Conscious perhaps of the important role this document had played in the renovation of his monastery

and the construction of the buildings in which he lived, he refrained from cutting the Plan apart, but folded it lengthwise
and crosswise into a sequence that furnished him with fourteen pages for his text, plus two empty pages that
served as covers (fig. 1).[3] Thus the physically unmanageable Plan was transferred into a book-sized volume that
could easily be incorporated into a conventional shelving system.

The author of the Life of St. Martin did not proceed with equal wisdom when he discovered toward the end of
his task that the back of the Plan was not large enough to accommodate all of his text. With his mind set on finishing
his work, he turned the Plan over and entered the last twenty-two lines of his text on the lower left corner of the
front side of the Plan. In order to use this portion of the parchment for his text, he erased the lines and explanatory
legends of a large building that occupied the northwest corner of the monastery site (fig. 1.X).

[1]

When the books were brought back from Reichenau, according to
Ekkehart "the number was the same, but not the books" (nam cum
reportarentur, ut ajunt, numerus conveniebat, non ipsi). Ekkeharti (IV.)
Casus sancti Galli, chap. 51; ed. Meyer von Knonau, 1877, 193-98;
ed. Helbling, 1958, 104-5. For further accounts of events that might
have threatened the survival of the Plan, see Duft, 1952, 36-38; and
Duft, in Studien, 1962, 33-36, as well as the literature quoted there.

[2]

Duft, ibid.

[3]

This Vita sancti Martini (not known to the editors of the Bibliotheca
Hagiographica Latina) was first examined by P. Lehmann, in 1947,
after the Plan had been freed from its seventeenth or eighteenth century
backing of linen. Lehmann found it to be not without hagiographical
merit. He describes it as a judicious compilation and alignment of a
number of widely distributed narratives of the life and miracles of St.
Martin, written in St. Gall, in a careful gothic minuscule used toward
the close of the twelfth century in southwest Germany and northeast
Switzerland.

For details see Lehmann, 1951, 745-51; with regard to the chapter
sequence and its relation to the folding system of the Plan, see Schwarz,
1952, 35.