University of Virginia Library

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For more than 40 years the art and architecture of the Middle Ages has fascinated me. In all that time, no other architectural
testament has so thoroughly compelled my attention as that Carolingian plan for a monastic settlement, the parchment
known as the Plan of St. Gall, to the study of which these books are devoted. Ernest Born and I have worked on this
project intermittently since the Council of Europe exhibition Karl der Grosse, held in Aachen in 1965. But despite long
familiarity, when I enter my study in the morning, my eye falling upon a facsimile Plan hanging there, it arouses the same
intellectual stirrings and aesthetic engulfment I experienced when as a student, I viewed the Plan for the first time in the
presence of my teacher, Erwin Panofsky.

The Plan of St. Gall gathers as in a lens an image of the whole of
Carolingian life. Product of the first synthetic encounter between
Antiquity and the new civilization of the Barbarian north, it testifies
the first pervasive alliance between Church and State in this nascent
world, and the first successful integration into the fabric of the
State, as a force at once spiritual, educational, and economic, of the
ideal of monasticism which in Antiquity had taken its start as a
counter culture.

The men who conceived the Plan were of the intellectual elite of
their time; they would have held striking presence among sagacious
men of any age. They were expert in every facet of that microcosm
of life compacted by history within the walls of a monastic enclosure:
its spiritual and devotional aspirations, its educational endeavors,
its medical and sanitary services, its industrial and technological
facilities. Administrative and economic managers, they were
accomplished in agriculture, viticulture, animal husbandry.
Associated with them were the greatest scholars, illuminators, and
metal workers of the time.

The makers of the Plan possessed consummate skill in architectural
planning. They designed in a plot only 480 by 640 feet a
self-sustaining community for some 270 souls. Each structure is
scaled to a specific use, all are sited in relation to one another and to
the whole so as to insure proximity among related and distance
between disparate functions—a settlement of urban complexity,
clustered around the imposing bulk of a basilica that, had it ever
been built as conceived, would have been the most outstanding
church of the Age of Charlemagne.

It is to these men, anonymous as they are and separated from us
by a span exceeding a millennium, that we express our deepest
gratitude. They have enriched our lives by offering across the centuries
the exhilarating historical experience of participating in
retrospect in one of the keenest acts of Western architectural planning.
With their work they have held us spellbound and in the
course of time have become a part of us.

The co-author of this book is a modern descendant of such fiber
of man. Ernest Born's share in this project appears on every page of
it. Without him the books could have been written neither in a
technical nor a substantive sense. It is easy to acknowledge his
contribution where the boundaries of our tasks are clearly marked,
but nearly impossible to separate the roots of authorship in countless
instances when intellectual interaction led to changes in our common
thinking. He has embodied the abstractions of our research in
drawings at the scale of the original Plan, then given them new life
in a distinguished book design. He has illustrated the Plan's guest
and service buildings in ground plans and drawings of great strength
and elegance that are precise enough to be translated into accurately
scaled models.

Ernest Born has applied to the making of these books all the skills
of his rich professional career—architect, designer, draftsman.
Those privileged to work next to him are indebted to his penetration,
strength, and total inability to compromise quality in treating
even the smallest of innumerable details.

The remarkable abilities of Carl Bertil Lund, long an associate of
Ernest Born, became an invaluable resource in illustrating these
books. His skill in preparing layouts for perspectives of great pictorial
quality, an almost mysterious gift, Lund inherited from his
teacher Otto Eggers—in his era an architectural draftsman without
peer, an architect, and chief of design to architect John Russell
Pope. The full measure of Lund's work will be seen in the new
models of the buildings of the Plan, which he has been commissioned
to construct for an exhibition sponsored by the University
Art Museum, Berkeley, and the Pro Helvetia Foundation, Zurich.

Contributions of two other collaborators, Charles W. Jones and
A. Hunter Dupree—Jones with a translation of that landmark in the
history of Western economics, Adalhard's "Customs of Corbie;"
Dupree with an essay on the Plan's relevance to the history of
Western measurement—speak for themselves and are more fully
described in their introductions, in Volume III. Not so visible are

benefits accruing to the project through Charles W. Jones's vast
knowledge of patristic and early medieval literature. Impelled by
friendship and our common deep and binding devotion to the past,
he corrected and enriched the text, proofread all the galleys, and in
particular made a garland of virtue from the thorns of the Glossary,
which appears in Volume III.

We are most particularly indebted to Msgr. Dr. Johannes Duft,
head of the Stiftsbibliothek, St. Gall, and thus official guardian of
the original Plan, and to the late Hans Bessler. Both were prime
movers in efforts culminating in publication, in 1952, of the eight-color
facsimile print of the Plan of St. Gall, which made it available
for mensuration studies with precision instruments, the use of
which could not be risked on the original parchment. Dr. Duft then
permitted us, in a ten-day study of the original, to check whatever
theories could be developed from prior use of the facsimile. The
Löpfe-Benz facsimile has been of crucial importance in developing
color illustrations of parts of the Plan. Other fine photographs
and negatives of the Plan exist, but none adaptable for use here.
At last after many trials and much suspense, master printer
Charles Wood, using all the technology modern photolithography
could muster, proved that through the facsimile we could achieve
illustrations adequate to justify publishing these books.

Wolfgang Braunfels gave the motivating impetus to this work
when he asked us to furnish drawings for a three-dimensional model
of the buildings of the Plan for display at the exhibition Karl der
Grosse, and to offer, in connection with that project, a summary of
current knowledge about the Plan of St. Gall. We could comply
with the first, but not the second request because of the complexity
of historical problems raised by the Plan, its broad cultural ramifications,
and the highly controversial nature of many questions
involved. But that invitation represented the challenge from which
issued the concept and eventual completion of this work.

The planning and execution of a study of this scope was not the
work of a night's reflection. If the narrative of the books' making at
times took on sagalike dimensions, their auspicious completion owes
to the efforts of many over the years. We were fortunate in having
the advice and guidance of Irene Gordon to help establish editorial
style for the text at an early state. Lorna Price has carried the principal
burden and prime responsibilities for editing these books. To
applaud her handling of endless, taxing editorial minutiæ throughout
1200-odd manuscript pages would be an easy task. But few
words are strong enough to express thanks for clarifications she
brought to the project through her sharpness of mind, ability to
ferret out shortcomings in both style and logic, and her freshness,
speed, and spontaneity in treating them. In the best Benedictine
tradition she performed her task as corrector "gently" (leniter;
cf. p. 275, below).

In a discipline continuously enriched by successive generations of
scholars, it is appropriate to thank men whose work had a profound
impact on my own intellectual formation: my teachers, Erwin
Panofsky and Charles de Tolnay. Their influence has pervaded my
entire life. And there are others, colleagues to whom I am indebted
in this broader sense of shared learning: Kenneth John Conant,
George Forsyth, François Ganshoff, Richard Krautheimer, and my
friends Jean Bony, Wolfgang Lotz, Carl Nordenfalk, and Lynn
White. Leo Hugot lent his own drawings for use in our analysis of
the grounds of the Palace Chapel, Aachen; Friedrich Prinz freely
offered his expertise in developing the map on p. vi; H. R. Sennhauser
has provided information from his work on the Carolingian
foundations of the present church of St. Gall. I have benefitted
greatly through the friendship of F. W. B. Charles, with whom I
have cooperated in other studies of vernacular architecture; likewise
from the vast knowledge J. T. Smith has brought to that
subject during many years of devoted service in the Royal Commission
of Historical Monuments of England.

For their unflagging labors in these vineyards we thank the
Trustees of the British Museum, and the Bodleian Library, and
their staffs, as well as the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Gabinetto
Fotographico Nationale, the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire,
Brussels, and the Musée d'Histoire et d'Art, Luxembourg. Other
archives and individuals, too many to list here, are acknowledged
at illustrations throughout the books.

Substantial contributions toward the production of these books
have come from several sources. As long ago as 1960, two Guggenheim
grants made it possible for us to study and survey surviving
medieval buildings related to the Plan's guest and service buildings
in the context of another study interrupted by our work on this one.

The Samuel H. Kress Foundation has provided extraordinarily
generous support that directly aided in making these volumes
exemplars of fine bookmaking. We thank Mary Davis, Executive
Vice President of the Kress Foundation, for the many times we
called on her for support of less material nature, when she responded
with vigor, warmth, and faith.

The Pro Helvetia Foundation of Switzerland has offered, for the
expressed purpose of making this work available to a broader range
of scholars and institutions, a subsidy intended to reduce the cost of
this publication, as well as a substantial grant and a pledge to sponsor
the travelling exhibition of the new model of the buildings of the
Plan of St. Gall. We are grateful in particular to Luc Boissonnas,
Director, Pro Helvetia Foundation, and to our friends Florenz
Deuchler and Christoph Eggenberger for their encouragement and
support. Other generous donors are acknowledged on page ii.

We thank Glen H. Grant, Assistant to the Chancellor, and Albert
Bowker, Chancellor, University of California, Berkeley, for their
assistance in working out details associated with funding the three
volumes; and William J. McClung, University of California Press,
for his sagacity and imagination.

Much remains to be said of the men and women backstage who,
with their specialized knowledge and skills, entered the intricate
process by which a typewritten manuscript is transformed into the
book the reader holds. Acknowledgement of their share in making
these books will be given in a colophon by Ernest Born, at the end
of Volume III. We hope that each one who has been drawn to
participate has left the work feeling in some measure enriched by it,
as we do ourselves.

The insight the Plan of St. Gall affords into every segment of the
culture and history of its age is inexhaustible, and will preclude, I
hope, that any reviewer refer to this book as a final, definitive treatment
of the subject. I would then consider my efforts to have failed
—failed to generate ideas worthy of controversy, failed to transmit
a sense of the timeless complexities and vast cultural ramifications
of this extraordinary document.