Scots Monastery, Regensburg
The Scots Monastery (in German Schottenkirche, Schottenkloster or Schottenstift) is the former Benedictine Abbey of St James (Jakobskirche) in Regensburg, Germany.
In Middle Latin, Scotti meant Gaels, not differentiating Ireland from Scotland, so that the term Schottenstift dates from the Irish period.
[1] The abbey was originally built to the south of the city walls around the year 1070, but this soon proved to be too small to accommodate the influx of Irish monks.
This second church, which stands today, was given a two-story transept or westwerk at the west end, an elaborate north portal, and a cloister to the south.
Regensburg became an important center for the missionary work of Irish monks in Europe; the Scots Monastery in Vienna is one of its daughter foundations.
The St. Jakob monastery had close connections with the monastic school at Cashel back in Ireland and attracted the theologian Honorius of Autun (d.1151) towards the end of his life.
It was demoted to a priory in 1820, but monks remained in residence until 1862, when the Bavarian government bought the property and turned it into a seminary for training Catholic priests.
[6] The entire complex was originally surrounded by a wall, which separated a cemetery to the north of the church from the street that led westwards out of the city.
The nave is separated from the aisles by cylindrical masonry pillars (not monolithic columns), whose capitals are fine works of high Romanesque sculpture.
[10] Under the triumphal arch at the entrance to the central apse stand three wooden sculptures of the late twelfth century, which together form a crucifixion scene.
[11] In the 1990s it was suggested that only the tympanum, archivolt, and jambs formed an original composition of the 12th century, while the remaining portions of the Schottenportal were assembled from spolia during the Renaissance.
At the lowest level, the door is framed at the center by richly decorated jambs, at each side of which stands a flat field interspersed with various relief sculptures.
These figures may refer to the history of the monastery itself: the monk with his staff to its origin among the hermits of Ireland; the musician to their position within the courtly society of Regensburg; and the fur-trader to their involvement with mercantile expeditions to Kiev.
Other daughter establishments of St. Jakob were the Scots Monasteries in Erfurt (ca 1136), Würzburg (1138), Nuremberg (1140), Konstanz (1142), Eichstätt (1148/49), Memmingen (1178/81), Kiev (later 12th century) and Kelheim (1218?).
In part it may have been motivated by the fact that the word Scotti had by this time come to mean 'Scots' in the modern sense, allowing the new abbots to claim that the Irish possession had always been illegitimate.
[17] The first Scottish abbot was Ninian Winzet (/ˈwɪnjət/, see yogh), the controversial critic of John Knox, who had been charged by Mary, Queen of Scots, with the task of providing priests for Scotland.
When in 1802 the Perpetual Diet of Regensburg determined, under pressure from Napoleon Bonaparte, to secularize all the church lands of the Empire, the Monastery was uniquely successful in avoiding this fate.
Arbuthnot and his influential monk, Alexander Horn, lobbied Macdonald and Lauriston, Scottish Catholic generals in the French army.
Arbuthnot declared the abbey a Scottish national shrine and the two priests successfully obtained the support of Charles Erskine, cardinal protector of Scotland in Rome.
[17] In 1814, it came under the authority of the Bishop of Regensburg, but it was still not dissolved, since the monastery had laid out a large part of its fortune at an Austrian bank which the state did not want to lose.
When the two last Scots monks finally left Regensburg in 1862, Anselm Robertson of Fochabers, the last prior, transported many of the greatest treasures to the Benedictine Abbey at Fort Augustus.
[18] Pride of place goes to a volume of texts written in 1080 by the Irish Benedictine monk Marianus, the founder of the community at Regensburg (NLS Acc.11218/1).
