The Plan of St. Gall Reconsidered

Late in the twelfth century an unknown monk at the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland took an old unwieldy parchment (112 x 77 cm.) with a drawing on one side and folded it upon itself, reducing its size to onesixteenth of what it had been. Upon fourteen frames on the unused side and one frame on the side with the drawing, he then wrote a text of the Life of St. Martin. Since the folded parchment was manageable in size, and given its new content, it was probably placed among the other manuscripts in the famous library of St. Gall. In this fashion the drawing that we know as the Plan of St. Gall was allowed to survive. Though we cannot be certain of its whereabouts until the late twelfth century, since then the manuscript has never left St. Gall, where it is now MS 1092 in the Stiftsbibliothek. The significance of the drawing began to be recognized in the seventeenth century. The verses inscribed on the plan were published in 1604, and from that time the literature has grown very greatly. None of it, however, can compare in scope and ambition with the three grand volumes published by Walter Horn and Ernest Born. Their remarkable and wonderfully detailed monograph, The Plan of St. Gall: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of, and Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery,1 embodies intentions nothing short of heroic: to extract, extrapolate from, and interpret the data of the plan so as to re-create not only the appearance of a great many buildings, but also the diverse human activities that they framed, especially but not exclusively during the early Middle Ages. This is a work of exegesis so massive that at first glance it seems no less surprising than the historical accident that brought about the preservation of the plan. Noteworthy, too, is the magnificent effort of book production, a fitting complement to the data of the densely packed text (mainly by Horn) and the elaborate, very accomplished drawings and renderings (mainly by Born). Arrestingly detailed captions, by Horn unless otherwise indicated, accompany a great many of the illustrations. In fact the captions are often so