Liesborn, Benedictine Abbey

The convent in Liesborn, situated in the diocese of Münster/Westphalia and originally founded as a women’s collegiate convent in 815, was converted into a Benedictine monastery in 1131 and dissolved in 1803. Severely affected by the plague in the 14th century, the wealthy abbey nevertheless recovered and experienced a revival during the 15th century as a member of the Bursfelde Congregation of the Benedictines.

It is thanks to the entries in a catalogue dating from 1219 that prove the existence of the monastic library in Liesborn from which 56 manuscripts have survived. However, the corpus of 70 manuscripts kept in Münster was destroyed at the end of the Second World War. A large part of the surviving codices are preserved at the Berlin State Library. The Gude collection – named after its collector Marquard Gude – as one of the major manuscript collections kept at the Herzog August Bibliothek counts eleven items from Liesborn, under the caveat, however, that their ascribed origin is not always clarified satisfactorily.

• Christian Heitzmann

Further reading:

Helmut Müller: Das Kanonissenstift und Benediktinerkloster Liesborn (Germania Sacra N.F. 23), Berlin / New York 1987 (about the library: pp. 47–57).

Helmut Müller: “Liesborn“, in: Westfälisches Klosterbuch: Lexikon der vor 1815 errichteten Stifte und Klöster von ihrer Gründung bis zur Auflösung, ed. by Karl Hengst, pt. 1: Ahlen – Mülheim / Münster 1992, pp. 522–529.