KASTL. - An ancient Benedictine abbey in the diocese of Eichstätt, founded in 1102 by the counts Berengario I of K.-Sulzbach and Federico of K.-Habsberg; confirmed and approved by Pasquale II on 12 May 1102, and occupied in 1103 by the Benedictines of Hirschau, who came from the abbey of Petershausen. In turn, it founded the abbey of Reichenbach in 1118.
From 1580 to 1480, K. was the centre of a broad reform movement; Abbot Ottone Norrveiner (d. 1400) composed the Consuetudines Castellenses, an adaptation of the Consuetudines Cluniacenses, which were adopted by 24 abbeys. K. attained its greatest doctrinal flourishing at that time under the priorship of Giovanni of K. (c. 1400), among whose ascetic-mystical writings belongs, as M. Grabmann has demonstrated, the De abdaerendo Deo, attributed to St Albert the Great until 1920. The abbey, suppressed in 1556, then restored to its possessions in 1625, transferred in 1636 to the Jesuits and in 1782 to the Order of the Hospitallers of Malta, was secularized in 1808.