The Greater Annals of St. Gall are the name we give to a set of annals composed in present-day Switzerland in the tenth and eleventh centuries, at the eponymous abbey of St. For the entry, for instance, the Greater Annals record a short poem describing the miraculous survival of a laborer who fell from St. Though both entries are in verse, they are in different hands, and are divided by a laconic entry β in three more hands β recording the death of abbot Gerhard and the appointment of Burchard.
Gall are based, in their earliest passages, on the St. Gall continuation of the Annales Alamannici , which extends until Substantial emendations have been made to the earlier material in the Greater Annals , however, and they cannot be said to be merely a continuation of the Annales Alamannici. This introductory essay serves to familiarize the reader with the context and production of the Greater Annals , as well as highlight several of the themes of the text most useful or interesting to the medievalist audience.
I especially focus on the role of the Greater Annals as an independent witness with often-diverging viewpoints to many of the important events of early medieval European history and its unique status as a repository of institutional memory and identity for the monks of St. According to local tradition, the abbey of St. Gall was first founded as a hermitage by the Irish saint Gallus, a companion of Saint Columbanus, who is said to have become a hermit there in Gall had become a favorite recipient of both local and royal patronage, and a series of grants over the course of the s gave the monks of St.
Gall independence from the bishopric of Constance and the right to freely elect their abbots. Abbot Gozbert β37 rebuilt the abbey and secured the canonization of its founder Otmar; Abbot Grimald β72 was chancellor and chaplain to Louis the German r. Gall was again a preeminent center for learning and scholarly production, especially under Abbot Burchard II and his schoolmaster Notker Labeo. Gall acts, for many historians, as the example par excellence of Carolingian monastic culture.
Gallen today contains some 2, manuscripts, of which at least are pre-millennium; hundreds more produced in the St. Gall scriptorium have been distributed to libraries across Europe. Gall , a schematic drawing from around possibly intended to be used in the rebuilding of the monastery. This plan has engendered much scholarly debate about the nature and function of Carolingian monasticism. At the same time, St. Gall also had a tremendous scholarly and artistic output.
