This composite manuscript is rich in material; it contains numerous
registers, compilations, and excerpts of astronomical and
especially geographic-historical content taken from a great variety
of sources and written down by the Swiss universal scholar Aegidius
Tschudi (1505−1572) from Glarus in the period after 1550. The
greatest part of the notes in this volume, collected, compiled and
ordered with great diligence by Tschudi, concern what today is
France (Gaul with its tribes, provinces, cities, mountains,
islands, etc.). Especially noteworthy are the maps Tschudi has
drawn of varies parts of Gaul (pp. 706−723). Among them are a map
of Franche-Comté (pp. 714/715) and of the western parts of
Switzerland (p. 717/718). After Tschudi’s death in 1572, the
three sheaves which make up the current volume remained in the
possession of his family, and from 1652 until 1768 they were held
at Gräpplang Castle near Flums. In February 1768 they came to the
Abbey Library of St. Gall, which purchased the Glarus scholar’s
estate of manuscripts. In St. Gall, the three sheaves, which were
listed as numbers 59, 43 and 44 in the auction catalog of 1767,
were bound together with several more leaves into the current
volume between 1768 and 1782.
