Monastery’s trove delights researchers

Work underway to digitize library

BERLIN — Take 2 liters of water and boil it with 20 liters of honey. Add in cinnamon and nutmeg, a healthy amount of ginger and pepper, plus some aniseed and coriander. Mix it all together with rye flour and water.

The result? A batch of 17th-century Lebkuchen for a Bavarian monastery housing up to 60 nuns and 25 brothers belonging to the uniquely women-led Bridgettine Order.

The recipe is part of a collection of more than 1,000 books that were taken from the Altomuenster Abbey after it was closed at the request of the Vatican earlier this year, a precious collection that scholars had worried might be locked away or, worse, broken up and possibly sold.

But instead it has been preserved intact at the diocesan archive in Munich and researchers have been given complete access, while work is underway to digitize much of the collection to make it available to anyone.

The rarest and most valuable tomes include manuscripts with colorful illustrations from the late 15th and early 16th centuries, but experts say items like the 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.

The former Benedictine abbey in Altomuenster, a town on the end of the subway line from Munich, had since 1496 housed a female religious order founded by St. Bridget in Sweden in the 14th century.

It was one of three monasteries of the original branch of the scholarly, monastic order still operating when it was closed by the Vatican in January after the number of nuns there fell below the three needed to train novices.

The diocese initially downplayed the potential value of the library, saying it only contained a handful of books of interest to scholars and that they had already been studied — raising the scholars’ fears about what might happen to them. The diocese sought to allay those worries when it announced Altomuenster would be closed, saying the books would be digitized and made available to the public.

That process is now underway and is expected to be complete by the end of next year.

The Lebkuchen recipe is one of several from eight cookbooks in the collection, according to the diocesan library’s senior archivist, Roland Goetz.

Aside from the recipes, Goetz said his favorite find so far has been a green wooden case, about the size of a shoe box, filled with tiny prayer books each about the size of a cigarette package. The nuns would put it out in their dining area for mealtime prayers, then pack it away again.

“It shows how the sisters lived with these books, that the books were a part of their daily life,” he said. “There were some very special things in the monastery.”