St. Gallen Abbey

The Abbey of Saint Gall stands in the city of St. Gallen in northeastern Switzerland. Founded in 612 by the Irish monk Gallus, it grew into one of the most important Benedictine monasteries in medieval Europe. Its library, one of the oldest in the world, holds manuscripts dating to the eighth century.

Schobinger’s Experiment

In 1530, a local artisan named Bartholomäus Schobinger conducted experiments with animal horn and heat in the abbey town. By applying controlled temperatures, he created a translucent, moldable material that hardened when cooled. The substance anticipated what the nineteenth century would call plastic. No one followed up on the discovery. The material would not be reinvented for three hundred years.

The Naked Prophetess

The abbey’s chronicles record an incident in which a woman entered the church during a service, stripped naked, and began prophesying. The monks recorded the event with the precision of men who documented everything. The woman’s identity and the content of her prophecy vary across accounts, but the disruption itself is consistently attested.

The Library

The abbey library is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The rococo hall, built in the eighteenth century, holds over 170,000 volumes and 2,100 manuscripts. The oldest items include an eighth-century Latin grammar and early medieval copies of classical texts that survived nowhere else. The library has been in continuous operation for over a thousand years.

That it survived at all it owes in part to Wiborada of St Gallen, an anchoress sealed into a cell beside the nearby church of St Magnus, who had bound many of the abbey’s manuscripts by hand. Her Lives say she foresaw the raid of the Magyar horsemen and warned the monks to carry the books up into the caves in the hills. They escaped with the library; she would not leave her cell, and in 926 the raiders broke through its roof and killed her at prayer. In 1047 she became the first woman a pope ever formally canonized, and she is the patron saint of libraries.