In the 10th century, a Benedictine community was established at the site of the hermitage (“Einsiedler” = hermit) of Saint Meinrad (797-861 CE). From 965 until 1806, the abbot of Einsiedeln was also a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. The reputation of the monastic library’s collection drew the attention of the early planners of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. Father Oliver Kapsner, OSB, visited Einsiedeln already in late 1964, hoping to obtain permission to photograph their manuscripts. Unfortunately for Father Oliver, the Swiss librarians had already agreed to refuse any such offer. Nevertheless, in this same period he was able to garner cooperation with monastic libraries in Austria and turned his attention to these. While no work could be done in the 1960s, three decades later (in 1997) HMML staff returned to Einsiedeln, where they microfilmed 580 manuscripts and collections of fragments. Many of these manuscripts date from the 8th to the 10th centuries, but the collection includes hundreds of manuscripts from throughout the Middle Ages.

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library has now added updated records for all of these manuscripts to its Reading Room (https://www.vhmml.org/readingRoom). In recent years, Swiss scholars have digitized almost 80 of these manuscripts and made them available at the e-codices website (https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en). In such cases, HMML has added links in the Reading Room records to the digitized versions.

With the addition of the online records for the Abbey of Einsiedeln, the descriptions of approximately 1000 manuscripts microfilmed by HMML in Switzerland are now complete. View now