Corvey Abbey

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The Imperial Abbey of Corvey (German: Fürstabtei Corvey) was a Benedictine abbey on the River Weser, 2km northwest of Höxter, now in North Rhine-Westphalia. It was founded ca. 820 by monks from Corbie in Picardy, under the patronage of the Emperor Louis the Pious and the abbot of the older foundation, whence the new one derived its name. Under the guidance of abbots drawn from the Imperial family, Corvey soon became famous for its school, which produced many celebrated scholars, among them the tenth century Saxon historian Widukind of Corvey. In its library were preserved the first five books of the Annales of Tacitus. From its cloisters went forth a stream of missionaries who evangelised Northern Europe, chief amongst them being St. Ansgar, the "Apostle of Scandinavia". The Annales Corbenjenses, which issued from the same scriptorium, is a major source of medieval history— spuriously supplemented by the forged Chronicon Corbejense which appeared in the nineteenth century.

The Carolingian west end of the abbey, with its landmark matching towers (built 873 — 885) survives, the earliest standing medieval structure in Westphalia, but the abbey church is now Baroque.

The school of Corvey declined after the fifteenth century, but the abbey itself, most of its feudal lands separated from it, continued until 1803, when it was secularized under Napoleonic administration and passed briefly to William of the family of Oranje-Nassau, then to Jérôme Bonaparte's Kingdom of Westphalia (1807), then to Prussia (1815); the landgrave of Hesse-Rotenburg rebuilt the abbey buildings as a Schloss (palace) which has descended to the duke of Ratibor. The famous abbey library has long since been dispersed, but the "princely library" (Fürstliche Bibliothek), an aristocratic family library, containing about 67,000 volumes, mainly in German, French, and English, with a tailing off circa 1834, survives in the Schloss. One striking feature of the collection is the large number of English Romantic novels, some in unique copies, for in Britain fiction was more often borrowed than bought, and was read extensively in the lending libraries.

[edit] External links

• Corvey, Nordrhein-Westfalen: introduction
• Catholic Encyclopedia: Abbey of Corvie
• "Fürstabtei Corvey" (in German)
• Peter Garside and Anthony Mandal, "Producing fiction in Britain, 1800 – 1829": outlining the Corbie project