Eighteenth century monastic libraries in southern Germany and Austria

Of all the buildings that survive from the early modern period, libraries seem the least familiar, due perhaps to the false but understandable assumption that their function as places for the storage and use of books is hardly different from that of most libraries today. Books, after all, have changed very little in form or materials since the sixteenth century. They are still stored upright on open horizontal shelves between vertical supports. Despite these similarities, however, the library, as both book collection and book-filled space, was a very different entity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such is particularly true of monastic libraries, which existed in great numbers and have survived more often and more fully intact than any other kind of library from the period. Constructed for use within the closed structures of the monastery, these libraries were meant to fulfil a very specific set of functions that cannot be taken for granted or assumed to be the same as those of present-day libraries.