Inventory Reception and Documentation of the Linz Jacob Boehme Archive
The
structured project , “Bestandsaufnahme und Documentation des Linzer Jacob Boehme
Archivs” which lasted for a total of three years – from 1st July 2001
until the 30th of June 2004 – was carried out by the Biblioteca Philosophica
Hermetica, Amsterdam (BHP) and the International Jacob Boehme Institute in Goerlitz.
The
subject of this project was the so-called Linzer Jacob Boehme Archive, an
extensive collection of scripts and printed documents dated from the 17th
Century up to the 20th Century, which are found today at four
different locations. The basis of the archive was started during the 1630’s by
the first Boehme publisher Abraham van Beyerland with collected Boehme scripts
and early Boehme copies, an inventory, which in the following centuries
continually grew with further documents, especially an extensive correspondence
of the “Angels-brothers and -sisters”, a community of radical pietists, orientated
towards the settings of Johann Georg Gichtel and Johann Wilhelm Ueberfeld.
During the course of its history, the archive was moved many times and at the
beginning of the 20th century, the archive was located in Linz on the
Rhein. During World War II, it was confiscated by the Gestapo and transported to
Berlin, where it was provisionally recorded. Towards the end of the war and in
the postwar time, the archive finally reached its modern locations, the
Oberlausitzische Bilbliothek der Wissenschaften (OLB) in Goerlitz, Herzog August
Bibliothek in Wolfenbuettel, University Library in Wroclaw and the BPH in Amsterdam.
The
goal of the project, headed by Dr. Gilly (Basel / Amsterdam), was the academic
development of the archive, meaning, on the one matter, the exact bibliographic
recordings of the inventory as it existed in Linz before 1941, and, on the other
matter, the historical documentation of the inventory, under which especially
the historical description of the Boehme–scripts as the essential component of
the archive is interpreted, from its arrival in Holland up to its
establishment in the Libraries Wolfenbuettel and Wroclaw.
A pleasurable
by-product of the archive / library work was the discovery of many unknown early
modern transcriptions, amongst them two pieces stand out: The first one is an
early copy of two Boehme-letters, dated back to the first half of the 17th
century. This discovery was introduced in October 2002 in the Baroque House, Neißstr.
30 in Goerlitz as the “Exhibit of the Month”. With this discovery, Goerlitz
has at least one early manuscript from Böhme’s writings at
its disposal. The
second is an existing 72 page fragmentary manuscript with copies of, until now,
unknown letters from Abraham von Franckenberg (1593 – 1652), one of the first
Boehme-biographers and the author of religious tracts. The numbers of the
known Franckenberg-letters, which were published in the year 1995 as the
framework of a critical edition, have increased more than 50% with this
discovery.
The inventory has been made available per internet for enquiries. Address: http://webis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/rsp/bib.gl2/katalog.html Data: Liar