Wolfenbüttel

Wolfenbüttel, an old town of Brunswick, on the Oker, 7 miles S. of Brunswick by rail. One of the old churches contains many of the tombs of the princes of Brunswick. The old castle now accommodates a seminary for teachers and a theatre. The library opposite, built in 1723 in the form of the Pantheon at Rome, became famous for its literary wealth and for the fact that Lessing was its librarian. It was Lessing who edited the 'Wolfenbüttel Fragments,' professedly from anonymous MSS. under his charge, but really from the pen of his friend Reimarus (q.v.), which startled the theological world of Germany. The Pantheon building had become so rickety and dangerous that it had to be taken down, being superseded in 1887 by a handsome new edifice, which houses 300,000 volumes (including 800 Bibles and a large number of incunabula) and 10,000 MSS.—one of them the 14th-century manuscript of Fordun's Scotichronicon stolen by M. Flacius Illyricus. There are in the town manufactures of machines, copper goods, flax, cloth, corks, leather, preserves, tobacco, &c.; pop. (with garrison) 13,453. The place is very ancient, and dates from 1046; it was besieged and taken in 1193 and 1542; and during the Thirty Years' War a battle was fought here in 1641. See a work on the town by Bege (1834) and on the library by Heinemann (1886).