Storming of the monasteries -'Klostersturm' & Carmina Burana

Johann Christoph von Aretin was a fanatical bibliophile-a bibliomaniac.

Carmina Burana

The Carmina Burana manuscript contains 318 songs in Latin and German. In 1803, when the monastery of Benediktbeuern was dissolved, the manuscript was discovered by Johann Christoph von Aretin (1772-1824), Who (among many other positions) was Head of the Commission on Monastic Libraries.¹

The storming of the monasteries (Klostersturm) in the Habsburg Empire began in January 1782 when Joseph II began dissolving purely contemplative religious houses.² There were hundreds of monasteries and thousands of monks and nuns.³

Johann Christoph von Aretin was entrusted with the con­fiscation of valuable books for the court library from monasteries in Bavaria, and coordination of confiscations for libraries across Bavaria (and disposal of the rest). Aretin’s goal as representative of the state’s bibliographical interests was to emulate the achievements of the French Revolution in destroying the monopoly of monasteries over the library resources of the land.⁴

Aretin had an “ebullient booty mentality towards monastery libraries.”⁵ He was a fanatical bibliophile-a bibliomaniac. He called his seizure of monastic libraries a “literary business trip,” (literarische Geschäfts­reise) with the goal of freeing up the library resources of the land from the deadly grip of monasterial possession.⁶

“The liquidation of Bavaria’s monastic and corporative libraries at the beginning of the 19th century was not just a side effect of closing the monasteries. The change was intentional. . . . The purpose was to gain control of the intellectual potential which the monastic libraries represented and to harness it for the purposes of the state.”⁷

All in all, Aretin oversaw the selection and transport to Munich of close to a quarter million books for the court library from the monasteries of the mendicant and prelate orders.⁸

Most research about Johann Christoph von Aretin is in German and we owe much to Jeffrey Garrett for his publications and translations about Aretin

1. Dummer, E. Heyse. "Johann Christoph Von Aretin: A Re-Evaluation." The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 16 (1946): 108-21.

2. The question of utility: The ‘Klostersturm’ under Joseph II. The World of the Hapsburgs.Website.

3. Ibid., “In 1770 there were 2,163 monastic establishments with more than 45,000 monks and nuns in the territory of the Habsburg Monarchy.” 

4. Garrett, Jeffrey (1999). Redefining Order in the German Library, 1775 - 1825, 1999. In: Eighteenth century studies / publ. quarterly for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Baltimore, Md.. 33: 103 - 123. 

5. Garrett, Jeffrey (1994). “Bibliophiles with an Attitude: French Influences on Bavarian Library Secularization Policy, 1800–1810,” RLA Romance Languages Annual 4 (1994).

6. Garrett, Jeffrey. 2015. “Klostersturm and Secularization in Central Europe: What Happened to the Libraries?” Theological Librarianship 8 (1): 61–69.

7. Hermann Hauke, "Die Bedeutung der Säkularisation für die bayerischen Bibliotheken," in Glanz und Ende der alten Klöster. Säkularisation im bayerischen Oberland 1803, J. Kirmeier and M. Treml, eds., Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1991, pp. 87-97 as quoted in Garrett, Ibid. (1999).

8. Ibid., Garrett (2015).