The Plan of Saint Gall is a medieval architectural drawing of a monastic compound dating from 820–830 AD. It depicts an entire Benedictine monastic compound, including church, houses, stables, kitchens, workshops, brewery, infirmary, and a special building for bloodletting. According to calculations based on the manuscript's tituli the complex was meant to house about 110 monks, 115 lay visitors, and 150 craftmen and agricultural workers.
The Plan was never actually built.[1] It was so named because it is dedicated to Gozbert, abbot of the Abbey of Saint Gall. The planned church was intended to hold the relics of the monastery's founder and namesake, the hermit Saint Gall. The plan was stored in the library of the monastery, the famous Abbey library of Saint Gall, where it remains to this day (indexed as Codex Sangallensis 1092).
It is the only surviving major architectural drawing from the roughly 700-year period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the 13th century. It is considered a national treasure of Switzerland and remains a significant object of interest among modern scholars, architects, artists and draftspeople for its uniqueness, its beauty, and the insights it provides into medieval culture.
There are two main theories concerning the motivations behind the drawing of the Plan. The dispute between scholars centres around the assertion put forward by Horn and Born in their 1979 work The Plan of Saint Gall, that the Plan in the Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen was a copy of an original drawing issued by the court of Louis the Pious after the synods held at Aachen in 816 and 817. The purpose of the synods was to establish Benedictine monasteries throughout the Carolingian Empire as a bulwark against renewed activity by the Hiberno-Scottish missions from Britain and Ireland who, although now Benedictine, were bringing some elements of Celtic monasticism to the Continent. Horn and Born argued that the Plan was a "paradigmatic" drawing of how a Benedictine monastery should look if the Benedictine Rule was to be strictly followed; a guide for the construction of future monastic ensembles.
Other scholars, particularly Werner Jacobsen, Norbert Stachura and Lawrence Nees have, on the contrary, argued that the Plan is an original drawing made at Reichenau Abbey for the abbot of Saint Gall, Gozbert, who decided to build a new abbey church in the 820s. This argument is based on Jacobsen's observations of marks left by pairs of compasses in the parchment, as well as alterations and changes undertaken during its drawing. Lawrence Nees has also argued that the fact that the manuscript was drawn and written by two scribes, a younger one and an elder who acted as a supervisor "filling in and completing where the knowledge of the main scribe ended",[2] can only be explained if the drawing is an original.