It was one of the half-dozen self-ruling princely abbeys of the Holy Roman Empire from the Late Middle Ages until 1792 when Corvey was elevated to a prince-bishopric.

Corvey, whose territory extended over a vast area, was in turn secularized in 1803 in the course of the German mediatisation and absorbed into the newly created Principality of Nassau-Orange-Fulda.

However, the plan was only implemented under his son, Emperor Louis the Pious, who announced the creation of an abbey east of the river Weser at a synod in Paderborn in 815.

[7] It soon became famous for its school, which produced many celebrated scholars, among them the 10th-century Saxon historian Widukind of Corvey, author of Res gestae Saxonicae.

The abbey's historian H. H. Kaminsky estimates that the royal entourage visited Corvey at least 110 times before 1073, occasions for the issuance of charters.

[8] In the Investiture Controversy, the abbot of Corvey took a stand with the Saxon nobles against Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor.

At that time, the Westwerk was reconstructed in the High Romanesque style, and the Carolingian three-tower set-up was replaced with twin towers.

[4]: 8 The Reformation threatened Corvey as it did the other ecclesiastical territories in north-west Germany but the princely abbey did survive somewhat precariously as a self-ruling principality at the border of Protestant Brunswick and Hesse-Kassel.

From the mid-16th century onward, the prince-abbot and his monks ran the administration in cooperation with a partly Protestant assembly consisting of three noble families, one town (Höxter) and a prelate.

[9] In 1508, books 1–6 of Tacitus' Annals were discovered at the abbey by Giovanni Angelo Arcimboldi (future Archbishop of Milan).

[10] In 1634, during the Thirty Years War the abbey building was sacked by imperial troops who also laid siege to Höxter.

After Christoph Bernhard von Galen, Bishop of Münster became prince and administrator of the abbey in 1665, reconstruction began.

[4]: 10 In 1792, Corvey ceased to be a Benedictine abbey and was raised by pope Pius VI to the status of a prince-bishopric.

One striking feature of the collection is the large number of English Romantic novels, some in unique copies, for in Britain fiction was more often borrowed than bought, and was read extensively in the lending libraries.

[11] The poet and author of the Deutschlandlied, August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, worked here as librarian from 1860 until his death in 1874.