Happy Island of Psalters and Cucumbers

Reichenau is an island smaller than Manhattan. It lies in beds of reeds on Lake Constance, in the far south of Germany. The Rhine flows west past its shores. Today Reichenau’s farms produce ton upon ton of lamb’s lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes, but in the centuries straddling 1000 CE it was a rich meadow of wall painting, manuscript making, and Latin poetry. A congregation of monks lived on Reichenau then. Many of them would have been given to the island’s abbey as children, and Reichenau became their home.

Around 827 a teen monk named Walafrid Strabo composed an ode in Sapphic stanzas to his monastery on the “insula felix” (“happy island”) of Reichenau. A homesick student in distant Fulda, nearly two hundred miles to the north, he was miserable and freezing and prayed to one day return. Later Walafrid wrote a horticultural poem in hexameter about the island monastery’s garden, full of medicinal plants and multipurpose gourds, in which he advises the novice gardener not to be afraid of getting dirty and calloused hands: “I didn’t learn about this from people’s chatter, or from looking at a lot of old books, or spending long days doing nothing—I gained my expertise through hard work and experience.”

Saint Pirmin had the more formidable job of casting out serpents when he came to Reichenau to found the abbey in 724. This wandering bishop’s miraculous pest control is relayed in a ninth-century account of his life. For three days the surface of the lake was covered with fleeing snakes. Another three days and Pirmin’s followers had made Reichenau beautiful: the air was healthy and the ground fertile, with shady trees and abundant vineyards. They got to work building a church.

Thirteen hundred years have now passed since Pirmin’s legendary founding of Reichenau Abbey, and much has been planned to celebrate the anniversary. The monastery was dissolved in 1757, but the abbey church remains, rebuilt and refurbished many times over. This is the Minster of St. Mary and Mark in the village of Mittelzell, on the north side of the island. Housed in the newly revamped treasury attached to its late Gothic choir is a fourth- or fifth-century stone vessel venerated as one of the jugs used by Christ at Cana to turn water into wine. Around the corner the island’s wine-making cooperative sells its (lighter) bottles out of the abbey’s cellars. Standing on Reichenau’s only hill, you can see over its greenhouses and across the lake to the city of Konstanz, where an exhibition dedicated to the abbey is on view through October at the Baden-Württemberg State Archaeological Museum. Though Pirmin didn’t stay long on Reichenau after founding the abbey, his pelvis has returned for the show, nestled in beaded silk within a Baroque reliquary shrine.

The exhibition chronicles the monastery’s rapid growth in the early Middle Ages as it positioned itself within a changing imperial and monastic landscape. We see Reichenau as a bright center of power, privilege, and learning, with strict internal routines and far-flung networks. Donations of land from royals and nobles allowed the monastery’s reach to expand far beyond the island, and the riches extracted from these lands funded building works on Reichenau. Around 995 the monk Purchard describes an island covered with churches as the night sky is ornamented with stars.

At the show in Konstanz, fragments of carved stone, stained glass, and wall painting invoke Reichenau’s decorated medieval churches. An egg-shaped ninth-century incense burner suggests their smell, recordings of music by the eleventh-century polymath Hermann of Reichenau their sound. There is also a scattering of medieval handheld bells from other abbeys. Bells like these would have been used to call Reichenau’s monks in from the garden or out of bed—keeping them organized and on schedule in a busy day of prayer.

Around 817, during Reichenau’s Carolingian Golden Age, two monks from the island, Tatto and Grimald, journeyed north to the Carolingian imperial center of Aachen, where Charlemagne had died in his palace a few years before. It was in Aachen that Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious decreed that monasteries in the empire must follow the Regula Benedicti, Benedict of Nursia’s sixth-century set of rules that shape a monastic life of humility and obedience. While at Aachen, Tatto and Grimald copied out a manuscript of the Regula Benedicti and sent it home for study.

Reichenau, a royal abbey with close links to Charlemagne’s heirs, would become a purely Benedictine one. Indeed, Reichenau’s tenth-century abbot Ruodmann was so concerned about the Rule not being followed at the neighboring abbey of St. Gall, twenty-some miles away on the mainland, that he went over to check for himself. He slipped into the cloister at night only to be discovered hiding in the darkness of the latrines. St. Gall’s monks were incensed by this intrusion. Although one of the furious brothers wanted to whip Ruodmann, in the end he got off with a fine. (Ekkehard IV, the St. Gall chronicler who reports this scandal, never mentions what infractions Ruodmann was expecting to find.)

The histories of these sister abbeys often intertwine. Around 850, Reichenau painters were sent to St. Gall to decorate that abbey’s walls. In 926, under threat from the Magyars, St. Gall moved its precious library to the safety of Reichenau. The island abbey was fortified by both water and wood: a palisade of many hundreds of tall oaken posts, recently dated to 910, barred Reichenau’s northern shallows. While St. Gall was sacked by the Magyars, its manuscripts found shelter on Reichenau.¹

Ekkehard would later grumble that Reichenau never returned all of St. Gall’s books. Despite this bad experience, the library of the erstwhile abbey of St. Gall has sent a dozen works to the Reichenau exhibition, among them its own ninth-century copy of Tatto and Grimald’s Regula Benedicti manuscript. Also on loan from St. Gall is a ninth-century collection of Walafrid’s poetry, including his moonlit verses of love and yearning and his life of Saint Blathmac, who was martyred by Vikings on the monastery island of Iona. (Whatever Walafrid’s experiences of friendship and romance, he never got to Iona, “rising above the wave-driven sea.” He drowned in the Loire in 849, on a mission to Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald.) Manuscripts like these, or indeed Reichenau’s confraternity book, which lists the names of its far-reaching connections down the centuries, tell the abbey’s history and hold this immersive, wide-ranging, and sometimes meandering exhibition together.

Though Reichenau’s books are now kept in Karlsruhe, the monastery once had an impressive library of its own. Pirmin is said to have brought the first manuscripts with him in 724, and by Walafrid’s time a century later there were over four hundred volumes at the abbey: old tomes from elsewhere and new manuscripts straight out of the monastery’s scriptorium. When the Alemannic bishop Egino retired from his post in Verona in 799, he moved to the marshes of Reichenau with his collection of elegant books. The ninth-century librarian and scribe Reginbert added a range of works to the abbey’s holdings, in some of them instructing the borrower: “Take, open, read, do not harm, close, return.” But at the exhibition in Konstanz, it is the Reichenau manuscripts never meant for the island’s own library that steal the show.

During its tenth-century Ottonian Silver Age, when a series of Ottos ruled the eastern slice of Charlemagne’s Francia extending from the North Sea down to Reichenau and over the Alps to Rome, the abbey began to create and export a different sort of book. With its ties to royal and noble patrons as well as to the very best artists, Reichenau produced opulent sacred manuscripts: sacramentaries and gospel lectionaries, gospel books and psalters that would shine and impress in ceremonies and churches elsewhere. On their animal-skin pages appear human figures engaged with the object of the book itself—biblical authors shown in the act of writing, as well as monks and abbots, archbishops and saints gifting and regifting the finished and bound work. The Hornbach Sacramentary, made on Reichenau in the 970s, opens with a series of four full-page scenes of the manuscript getting passed around. With each turn of the page, it is handed on: from scribe to abbot, abbot to Saint Pirmin, Saint Pirmin to Saint Peter, and finally from Saint Peter to Christ. The book goes up a holy chain of command.

Reichenau’s grand manuscripts also communicate the ambitions of its influential worldly contacts. One important figure is Egbert of Trier, who in 976 became the chancellor to Holy Roman Emperor Otto II; a year later he was appointed the archbishop of Trier. At the very beginning of a lavishly illustrated manuscript of gospel readings known as the Codex Egberti, Archbishop Egbert is shown being gifted the book. He sits dressed in his vestments before a backdrop of jammy reddish purple and accepts a closed book in golden covers from two diminutive monks wearing Benedictine habits.² They are labeled in gold ink as Kerald and Heribert “of Reichenau.” That Egbert was a great patron of the arts is well known. As for Kerald and Heribert, they may have served as scribes or painters of the Codex Egberti—or instead have presided over the project in the hands-off style of Jeff Koons.

We’ll come across Egbert again in the exhibit. He is depicted receiving yet another golden book in the Egbert Psalter, made on Reichenau around the year 980 (see illustration at top of article). The monk Ruodprecht, whose name is known from the golden dedicatory verses around him, presents the book to Egbert, enthroned across the gutter of the manuscript. Ruodprecht’s monastic uniform pales in comparison with Egbert’s glowing raiment and dainty episcopal slippers. Egbert, holding a bishop’s staff in his left hand, makes a gesture of blessing with his right. His extended fingers pierce the elaborate frame of foliage spiraling through the mouths of otherworldly beasts, gold flashing over a plane of sumptuous purple made from lichen.³ In this manuscript destined for Trier, Egbert is shown as he might have wished to be seen in that ancient city: placed in an illustrious lineage of its bishops depicted throughout the manuscript, each of his sainted predecessors given his own full page of gold upon purple.

A century ago a book with purple and gold covers was published to celebrate the 1,200th anniversary of Reichenau Abbey. In this Festschrift, the art historian Albert Boeckler wrote in praise of the powerful manuscripts from Ottonian Reichenau “that surpass all others of this age.” Admired for their miniatures of monumental figures within fields of sublime color, Reichenau’s resplendent exports are regarded as examples of, and evidence for, an Ottonian Renaissance. Several were made for the emperor Otto III himself, and more went to his cousin and successor Henry II. Much later, another bibliophile named Henry, the railwayman Henry Walters, brought a Reichenau gospel book to Baltimore sometime before his death in 1931, and as recently as 2022 the Getty in Los Angeles bought a Reichenau gospel lectionary long housed at the Catholic University of Lille, after a failed effort by France to keep this “national treasure” in the country. Having traveled so far, neither of these works has made the long trip back to the shores of Lake Constance.

Scholarship has also kept Reichenau’s roving books on the move. Many of its most renowned manuscripts were thought to possibly have been made in Cologne or Trier until the German art historian Arthur Haseloff got hold of them in 1900. Haseloff had been enlisted by the Society for Useful Research of Trier to write a book on the Egbert Psalter. (His research didn’t ultimately prove very useful for Trier.) Setting out on the project, Haseloff was by his own description “anti-Reichenau,” dubious of attributions to the island. Upon consulting the manuscripts, he was forced to conclude not only that the Egbert Psalter was Reichenau-made but that the island was “the epicenter of the most dazzling German painting school of its time…its products coveted from the North Sea to Italy.” After Haseloff, Reichenau came to be seen as a major center of luxury bookmaking, and an increasing number of manuscripts were acknowledged as its lavish products.

Yet some remained firmly anti-Reichenau. In 1965 the British art historian Charles Reginald Dodwell downgraded Reichenau from illuminated manuscript “general headquarters” to a mere “outpost.” In Dodwell’s view, Ottonian accounts keep too silent about Reichenau’s making of books for it to have been the glittering scriptorium that Haseloff, Boeckler, and others had reconstructed, manuscript by manuscript:

It can be likened to a Cotswold wall, which is built not with cement and mortar but of dry stones carefully balanced against each other. The stability of each stone is dependent on another and if one is removed then others will almost certainly fall. So it is with Reichenau.

Dodwell argued that the manuscripts ascribed to Reichenau were in fact made in scriptoria at Lorsch or Trier. But few agreed with his withering takedown, and since the 1960s most of the books Dodwell pulled off the island have been put back as these masterpieces continue to be studied. In 1991 Henry Mayr-Harting wrote to settle the matter: “We may conclude that Reichenau was indeed Reichenau.”

The individual traits of certain now-anonymous makers have been traced within and between Reichenau manuscripts as they worked in flexible teams of scribes, painters, and scribe-painters to meet the particular demands of a job. Deluxe manuscripts could take months or even years to complete, and plans often had to change. The monk Heribert came late to the Codex Egberti: technical analysis has revealed that his figure was added to stand alongside Kerald at Egbert’s knees after most of the donation scene had already been painted. (There’s no record of what Kerald made of Heribert’s edging in.)

Of the four or five painters of the Codex Egberti, one is rather famous. He is called the Gregory Master. This master at the application of gold leaf and washes of soft color was responsible for seven of the Codex Egberti’s more than fifty painted episodes from the life of Christ, but he really owes his moniker to a project he undertook for Egbert in Trier: a grand copy, now mostly lost, of many hundreds of letters that Gregory the Great sent in his years as pope. In a delicately colored surviving leaf on display in the exhibition, Gregory sits within a pastel church divided by curtains into cubicles. He is holding a closed book and resting a hand on another volume open to blank pages. He isn’t reading or writing; he’s listening. The Holy Spirit in the form of a white dove perches on his shoulder, cooing divinely inspired words into Gregory’s ear.

The creators of Reichenau’s Ottonian manuscripts took inspiration from a variety of sources: Roman sculpted capitals and Byzantine carved ivories as well as manuscripts from late antiquity and the not-so-distant Carolingian past. Some must have known the wall paintings in the Church of St. George, by the water on the east end of Reichenau. This church, built around 900, still houses the skull of that saint, a gift from the pope brought to the island in 896. On the north wall of the church’s interior, toward Lake Constance, Christ can be seen on the Sea of Galilee and by the Pool of Siloam. He performs a series of miracles: healing the possessed and the sick, calming a storm, giving sight to a blind man. These scenes of wonder resound within the illuminated manuscripts from Reichenau and along the lake’s shore. Christ repeats his miracles on the walls of the waterside Chapel of St. Sylvester at nearby Goldbach, painted by artists who likely came across from Reichenau.

These days you can walk to Reichenau along a busy causeway lined with poplars. For a while after this year’s very wet spring, the lake’s rising waters made the island even smaller than usual. At the Minster of St. Mary and Mark, where Saint Mark himself is said to have once complained of the damp, Walafrid’s garden has been replanted within the old abbey grounds. By St. George’s, I watched a tractor racing through a field to be sown with zucchini right up to the church’s walls, and going past Egino of Verona’s resting place at the Church of St. Peter and Paul, I heard the warbling vespers of the handful of Benedictines who returned to Reichenau in 2001.

After a fire destroyed their communal buildings in 1235, the monks of Reichenau stopped living under the same roof. In the 1360s, with the abbey in debt, Reichenau’s cellarer blinded a fisherman as punishment for poaching in its waters, and by 1453 the abbot had enclosed the dwindling community behind a high stone wall. Throughout its long history, the abbey had always guarded both its resources and its separation, even as Reichenau abbots were sent off as agents of empire. The Carolingian abbot Heito went to Constantinople on Charlemagne’s behalf, and the Ottonian abbot Witigowo accompanied Otto III to Rome for his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor.

In Konstanz, we spot this Otto as a toddler on a panel of elephant ivory carved in 980s Milan. He’s being held up to the feet of Christ by his mother, the Ottonian empress and Byzantine princess Theophano. His father, Otto II, had married Theophano at St. Peter’s in Rome in 972—though she was “not the desired maiden,” Thietmar of Merseburg records that Theophano had arrived from Constantinople with a “splendid entourage and magnificent gifts,” and the alliance went ahead. Traveling back from the wedding together with Theophano’s imperial in-laws, the party stopped on Reichenau. We don’t know exactly what finery Theophano brought with her into this new life, but some have seen the influence of her Byzantine style in a liturgical book of prayers made on Reichenau at just this time (see illustration at right).

At the exhibition, the Petershausen Sacramentary is open to a two-page spread with a regal Virgin Mary in elaborate Byzantine jewelry. Hovering before a shimmering roundel, Mary is turned toward her son, seated in majesty on the facing page within a matching sphere. She has left the manger and stable behind and appears in patterned silk, dangling gems, and crown as the queen of an azurite-blue heaven. Holding a codex as well as a jeweled cross, this overloaded mother of God doubles as Ecclesia, the personified Church and bride of Christ. With the closing of the book, mother and son, Church and Christ, bride and bridegroom, press together into one.