St. Gall Monastery Plan (Codex Sangallensis 1092) and Library

The St. Gall Plan is the earliest preserved and most extraordinary visualization of a building complex produced in the Middle Ages. Ever since the Plan was created at the monastery of Reichenau sometime in the period 819-26 A.D., it has been preserved in the Monastic Library of St. Gall (Switzerland). Indeed, its presence there was singled out by UNESCO as a reason that the library, the repository of over 2000 late antique and medieval manuscripts, was designated a World Heritage site in 1983. The St. Gall Monastery Plan website, created with the financial assistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation by scholars at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Virginia, presents the plan, its origins, components, and notations, as well as four centuries of scholarship on the plan within the context of ninth-century material culture.

The UCLA Digital Library Program is working with the St. Gall Plan team on Phase Two of the project: creating a digital library encompassing all of the ninth century library holdings of the monastery that produced the Plan (Reichenau) and of the monastery for which the Plan was created (St. Gall). While Phase One of the project created a research tool for the investigation of the physical and material aspects of Carolingian monastic culture, Phase Two would concentrate on the intellectual and textual aspects of the Plan and of monasticism, primarily by identifying and providing access to the contents of the specific manuscripts containing the texts that informed the world of those who produced and appreciated the plan and by linking features of the Plan to important scholarly discussions in the secondary literature. In addition, Phase Two will develop and maintain a virtual research and publication space where scholars and teachers could publish electronically occasional papers related to Carolingian monasticism and the St. Gall Plan in particular, post lesson plans and other teaching aids exploiting the material on the site, and participate in discussions, blogs, and chat rooms for pursuing related issues. In addition, the permanent site would develop means for scholars from around the world to continue the work of adding texts, images, and objects to the data base created during Phase One.

Visit the St. Gall Monastery Plan website.

The St. Gall Monastery project has been supported by generous grants from the Mellon Foundation.