Features

MONTSERRAT ABBEY

Montserrat’s miracle

Most of the thou­sands of vis­i­tors to the monastery of Montser­rat, one of Cat­alo­nia’s iconic land­marks, do not visit the abbey’s li­brary in the clois­ter, most likely be­cause they do not know it ex­ists. Yet the li­brary is one of the monastery’s most sig­nif­i­cant spaces and a tes­ta­ment to Montser­rat’s role in Cata­lan cul­ture and his­tory.

The li­brary’s book col­lec­tion is some­thing of a mir­a­cle in that it has sur­vived in one form or an­other from the 11th cen­tury until today. The most tragic mo­ment in the li­brary’s long his­tory oc­curred in 1811, dur­ing the Penin­su­lar War, when the monastery was razed and its book col­lec­tion dis­persed. Lit­tle by lit­tle, how­ever, the li­brary was re­built and, under abbot An­toni M. Marcet (1878-1946), the li­brary was re­stored and grew in only a few years from 15,000 to 150,000 vol­umes.

In the in­ter­war pe­riod, from 1918 to 1936, it con­tin­ued to grow, with the ac­qui­si­tion of en­tire col­lec­tions from coun­tries such as Ger­many, in­clud­ing the gem se­lected for us by li­brar­ian, Ánge­les Rius. With the out­break of the Civil War in 1936, the monks were forced to flee the monastery but the quick in­ter­ven­tion by the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment man­aged to safe­guard the col­lec­tion, while books from the Cul­ture Mili­tias or the Li­brary Ser­vice of the Front from that pe­riod be­came part of the col­lec­tion.

The li­brary boasts a col­lec­tion of some 330,000 books, 1,500 man­u­scripts, 400 pam­phlets, 18,000 en­grav­ings and 3,800 16th-cen­tury works, an ex­cep­tional re­source at the ser­vice of monks and schol­ars.

Mon­u­ments of Egypt and Ethiopia

Year: 1849-1859

Au­thor: Karl Richard Lep­sius

Printer: Nico­lais­che Buch­hand­lung (Berlin)

An expedition to Egypt

“Karl Richard Lepsius (Naumburg, Saxony-Anhalt, 1810-Berlin, 1884), Prussian linguist and librarian, was one of the first scholars and also one of the first Egyptologists to set down the guidelines and methodology of this science. Between the years 1842 and 1845 he carried out a scientific expedition to Egypt on behalf of the King of Prussia, Frederick William IV. He summarised the results of the expedition in the great work Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien (Monuments from Egypt and Ethiopia). Swiss archeologist Édouard Naville was responsible for publishing the texts, while fellow Egyptologist Kurt Sethe was responsible for preparing them for publication, with the assistance of archeologist Ludwig Borchardt.”

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