A collection of more than 1,000 books taken from a shuttered, female-led abbey in southern Germany is being preserved and digitized, to the delight of scholars who had feared it might be lost.
The rarest and most valuable tomes of the Altomuenster Abbey include manuscripts with colorful illustrations from the late 15th and early 16th century, but experts say items like recipe books are also invaluable to the study of the Bridgettines, helping tell the tale of what daily life was like behind the closed doors of the monastery hundreds of years ago.
“It’s a great victory for scholarship,” said Volker Schier, a Bridgettine scholar and researcher at the Catholic University Leuven, in Belgium, who was one of the instigators of a petition with some 2,000 signatures urging the preservation of the books.
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