I.1.1
FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE
MIDDLE OF THE 19th CENTURY
The Plan was thus made subservient to a hagiographical
text of lesser importance, and in this new association—
as the subsequent history shows—its original meaning fell
into oblivion. In a fragmentary catalogue of the holdings
of the Library of St. Gall, which was written in 1461 under
Abbot Kaspar of Breitenlandenberg, the document is
listed as a "large animal skin with the life of St. Martin
written upon it and a delineation of the houses of his
monastery" (pellis magna continens vitam S. Martini
scriptam structuramque domorum eius depictam). The author
of this catalogue, as is obvious from this entry, considered
the text on the back of the skin to be the principal part of
this document and interpreted the drawings on the front
of the skin as an outline of the monastery of St. Martin at
Tours.[4]
The true character of the Plan was rediscovered by
Henricus Canisius who in 1604 published the verses of the
Plan,[5]
primarily for their literary interest. Canisius (d.1610)
was unaware of the paradigmatic character of the Plan but
thought it was a site plan of the monastery of St. Gall
"as it looked at the time of Abbot Gozbert." He was the
first to identify the "Cozb[er]tus" of the dedicatory legend
with Abbot Gozbert, who presided over the monastery of
St. Gall from 816-836, and inferred correctly from the fact
that the abbot was addressed as "my sweetest son"
(dulcissime filie) that the author of the Plan was a man of
higher rank and must have been a bishop.[6]
One of the
consequences of the rediscovery of the Plan by Canisius
was that some time in the seventeenth or eighteenth century
(the date can no longer be established) the Plan was
strengthened with a backing of linen, which concealed the
Life of St. Martin.
On the basis of the interest awakened by Canisius, the
great Benedictine scholar Jean Mabillon (1632-1707)
featured in the second volume of his Annales ordinis
sancti Benedicti[7]
the first graphical reproduction of its
explanatory titles. This engraving was neither complete nor
free of errors, but being published in a widely distributed
historiographical work, made the contents of the Plan
accessible to the learned world.
