Liber Viventium Fabariensis Facsimile Edition

Created in the first quarter of the ninth century, the Liber Viventium Fabariensis is among the most important surviving monuments of Rhaetian book culture. Conceived for the Benedictine Abbey of Pfäfers as an Evangelistary, it gradually became something more expansive: a sacred register in which Gospel readings, communal memory, legal authority, and institutional history were gathered into a single living volume.

A Book for the Living and the Dead

From around 830, spaces originally designed for canon tables began to receive the names of monks, allied religious communities, patrons, and benefactors. The manuscript thus served the medieval practice of memoria, preserving individuals within the monastery’s cycle of prayer. Living and deceased members alike entered a spiritual fellowship sustained through liturgical remembrance.

Rhaetian Script and Carolingian Ornament

The parchment codex comprises 91 folios, written chiefly in Rhaetian minuscule, usually in two columns of approximately thirty lines. Its decoration includes full-page representations of the symbols of the four Evangelists, elaborate double arcades, and pen-drawn initials enriched with red and yellow. Interlace, foliage, geometric patterns, and human, bird, and animal heads animate the letters with disciplined invention.

An Archive within an Evangelistary

Across several centuries, the manuscript accumulated charters, property records, legal statutes, inventories of relics, books, and treasures, and nearly 4,500 names. These additions transformed a liturgical book into an essential institutional archive without erasing its sacred character.

The Liber Viventium Fabariensis embodies the medieval manuscript as a continually renewed object. Its pages do not merely preserve the past; they reveal how writing, worship, community, and authority were woven together across generations.