Sélestat: The Humanist Library of Beatus Rhenanus

Required Activities

• Count the 25 Vosges sandstone piers of Ricciotti's extension outside — they are set like the pages of a book — then go in and find the shelves of Beatus Rhenanus's own library among a collection of 460 manuscripts and 550 incunabula, and look up at the vaulted steel frame that holds the old corn hall up without hiding any of it

• Go into the gothic church of Saint-Georges and work out where a library could have been kept in it: this is where the parish books lived from 1452, each one fitted with a chain against theft, and where Beatus Rhenanus's own books joined them in September 1757 before both collections ever reached a building of their own

• At the main door of Sainte-Foy, carved in the second half of the 12th century and complete, find the crouching atlantes squashed under the cushion stones, then the angels, serpents, winged monsters and the lion's head on the capitals, and read the Last Judgement and the Tetramorph across the tympanum — then walk round to the east end and pick out the alternating bands of Vosges sandstone and Dambach-Scherwiller granite

• Work along the nave capitals of Sainte-Foy looking for interlace: the masons came from Saint-Dié, out of a monastery of the early Irish church, and their patterns are close to the Book of Kells. Then find the three 19th-century capitals on the south side that carry portraits of the architect, the sculptor and the contractor who restored the nave in 1891, with their names cut into the abaci above them

• Go down into the crypt, the one part left of the church of about 1087, and find the cast of the head taken when Hildegarde's coffin was opened intact in 1892, her remains under a layer of lime that suggests plague — then look for the same cast again in the Humanist Library, and judge for yourself whether the face is a woman of seventy-two or, as some argue, her daughter Adélaïde