The Buxheim Charterhouse library collected over 700 manuscripts during its 400-year history. At present, the current location of some 450 manuscripts is known. The auction catalog of 1883 lists 452 volumes, but we know that this sale did not include all the library’s manuscripts. The eighteenth-century shelf marks attached to the bottom of the spines of manuscript book bindings count to at least 711. Many of these were originally gifts from those who entered the monastery, many were produced at the Charterhouse itself. They include several thirteenth-century psalters and thus range in age from well before the monastery’s foundation (1402), to the middle of the eighteenth century. Even once the technology of movable type and the printed book had taken hold in the second half of the fifteenth century, and Buxheim’s librarians were enthusiastic collectors, the Carthusians continued to copy and write their own books in manuscript form throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and beyond.
