HIRSCHAU, or Hirsau, a village within the amt of Calw and the circle of Schwarzwald, Würtemberg, on the Nagold, is a station on the Pforzheim-Horb Railway, and has paper and other factories. Population 800. It owes its origin and its historical interest to the now ruinous Benedictine monastery in the neighbourhood, the Monasterium Hirsaugiense, at one period one of the most famous in Europe. It was founded in 830 or 832 by Count Erlafried of Calw, at the instigation of his son, Bishop Notting of Vercelli, who enriched it with, among other treasures, the body of St Aurelius. Its first occupants (838) were a colony of fifteen monks from Fulda, disciples of Hrabanus Maurus and Walafridus Strabus, headed by the abbot Liudebert. During about a century and a half, under the fostering care of the counts of Calw, it enjoyed great prosperity, and became an important seat of learning; but towards the end of the 10th century the ravages of the pestilence combined with the rapacity of its patrons, and the selfishness and immorality of its inmates, to bring it to the lowest ebb. After it had been desolate and in ruins for upwards of sixty years it was rebuilt in 1059, and under Abbot William “der Selige” (1069-1091) more than regained its former splendour. By his Constitutiones Hirsaugienses, a sort of new religious order, Ordo Hirsau-giensis, was formed, of which the rule was afterwards adopted by many monastic establishments throughout Germany, such as those of Blaubeuren, Erfurt, and Schaffhausen. The friend and correspondent of Pope Gregory VII., and of Anselm of Canterbury, he took active part in the politico-ecclesiastical controversies of his time; while a treatise from his pen, De Musica et Tonis, as well as the Philosophicarum et astronomicarum institutionum libri ...