MONASTIC COLLECTIONS IN THE ARCHABBEY OF ST. OTTILIEN
Our Mission Museum houses a missionary collection, typical of missionary orders. However, numerous monasteries have collections of all kinds, be it books, works of art, or specific objects.
Benedictine abbeys, in particular, were and still are traditionally centers of learning. The collections of books and manuscripts in monasteries have served as resources for research and science since the early Middle Ages.
Benedictine monks were often also trained in the natural sciences and worked as botanists, mineralogists, or zoologists. Since many Benedictine abbeys had or have their own schools, these collections often served for educational purposes and as illustrative materials.
Many monasteries also contain treasure chambers. These contain works of art, precious vestments and altar vessels for Holy Mass, or even relics of saints. St. Ottilien, a relatively young monastery (founded in 1887), has smaller holdings here, but a respectable collection of approximately 490 nativity scenes.
The creation or expansion of natural history monastic collections is rare today. There may be several reasons for this. Large religious orders used to be able to release someone for scientific work much more easily.
Today, the often declining numbers of new religious members makes it difficult for the convent leaders to entrust research in specialized fields to interested members.
A second reason why collecting has become and continues to become increasingly uncommon is probably the replacement of object-related visualizations with digital presentation options. Species protection has also become a priority for zoological and botanical collections: collecting plants and animals, which would entail their killing, is often no longer permitted.
The special exhibition features exhibits from the following collections:
- Minerals and fossils collection: The rocks and minerals gathered by many collectors are traditionally on display in the library corridor at St. Ottilien, so the Archabbey's librarians have always been responsible for this extensive collection.
- Herbarium Ottiliense: Almost all of the many thousands of dried and pressed plants, collected by several monks of the Archabbey over many decades, were donated to the Munich Botanical Institute in October 2023.
- Xylothek: Only a small portion of the wood collection has survived. The xylothek was used for biology classes at the Sankt Ottilien High School. The collectors are unknown.
- Bird Eggs: No collectors are known by name for the school's teaching collection either. Just like the school collection of mammals and birds, it was always curated and continually expanded by biology teachers.
- Stamp collection: A page from one of Brother Burkhard Bäuml's (1920-2008) stamp albums.
- Relic collection: Relics are usually the bones of canonized figures of the Catholic Church. Such relics were venerated even in early Christianity; they gave the person a sense of connection with a saint known to be "in heaven".
