History of the Corvey Collection:
THE
ORIGINS OF CORVEY
THE
CORVEY
COLLECTION Founded by Ludwig
the Pious, son of Charlemagne, in 822, the Benedictine abbey
of Corvey became a significant centre of northwestern European
culture in the ninth and tenth centuries. Emperors lodged at
Corvey as guests, Christianity found a stable locus in Corvey,
and monks from Corvey occupied important positions within the
ecclesiarchy of Germany. Destroyed for the most part
during the Thirty Years’ War, Corvey was eventually rebuilt
from about 1660 onwards in its present form, as a Baroque residence
with church, monastery and farmhouses. The Imperial
Abbey became a Principality in the early thirteenth century
and a Bishopric in 1794, but during the Secularization of 1803
its ecclesiastical significance was dissolved. In
1821, Victor Amadeus (1779–1834),
Landgraf von Hesse-Rotenburg, acquired Schloss Corvey by exchange,
and his nephew, Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst,
inherited the estate in 1834, becoming in 1840 the first Duke
of Ratibor and Prince of Corvey. It was Victor Amadeus
and his wife Elise—both avid encyclopaedic book-collectors
typical of post-Aufklärung Germany—who were
responsible for collecting the works of literature which now
form the Corvey Collection. 
The collection held at Corvey consists of approximately 73,000 volumes, forming one of the largest private collections in Europe, and since 1987 it is a listed cultural monument of Germany; Corvey as a whole will probably soon become part of UNESCO’s cultural heritage of the world. The preliminary breakdown of the volumes is as follows: German–36,000; French–19,000; English–16,000; Other languages–2,000. The library was begun as a court library for the Landgrafs of Hesse-Rotenburg, typical of the tastes of the times until the coming of Victor Amadeus in the 1790s. Following the French Revolution, there was an increase in the number of English titles collected, something unseen in comparative collections of the time. Victor Amadeus was a bibliophile, who carefully collected books in French, English, and German from a variety of interests. Compared with similar libraries which offer a broader spectrum of texts, the Corvey collection is interesting because of its concentration of belles lettres: a depth of focus which is of a significantly different order from its more austere contemporaries. The kinds of works collected by Victor Amadeus could be considered those of the more ‘trivial’ sort: novels, tales, travel literature, biographies, memoirs, and drama. As a result of Victor Amadeus’ more populist tastes, many of the books held at Corvey are simply not to be found in other significant libraries in Europe or the United States. The density of popular literature which had been collected during Victor Amadeus’ tenure at Corvey dissipated with his death in 1834, which coincides with the focus of Peter Garside and Rainer Schöwerling’s bibliography of the English novel, 1800–1829. |
