Biblical Books in the Romanian Lands in the Sixteenth Century

Figures

Figure 1: Mareș’s stemmata codicum of the Romanian sixteenth-century Psalters

Figure 2: Hypothesised First and Second Redaction of the Psalter in Romanian

Figure 3: Hurmuzaki Psalter, f. 62r

Figure 4: Hurmuzaki Psalter, f. 64v

Figure 5: Revised affiliation scheme of the Romanian sixteenth-century Psalters

Figure 6: Costinescu’s stemma codicum of the Romanian Apostolos texts

Figure 7: Affiliation scheme of the Romanian sixteenth-century Apostolos texts

Tables

Table 1: Books printed in Romanian, sixteenth century

Table 2: Candrea’s examples of misinterpreted Slavonic expressions

Table 3: Shared readings in Redactions I, II and Pseudo-Athanasian commentary and the Romanian translations

Table 4: Readings specific to Theodoret’s commentary and the Romanian translations

Table 5: Shared readings by Redaction III and IV and the Romanian translations

Table 6: Distinctive readings of Redaction IV and the Romanian translations

Table 7: Distinctive readings of Redaction III and the Romanian translations

Table 8: Slavonic adjectives of possession and their rendering in Romanian

Table 9: Change in past constructions in Slavonic and their rendering in Romanian

Table 10: Peculiar renderings in Voroneț Psalter

Table 11: Rosetti’s examples from the Apostolos text (1968d)

Table 12: Collation of psalm 119

Table 13: Collation of James Chapter 3, verses 1–7

Table 14: Double renderings in the Hurmuzaki Psalter

Table 15: Double renderings in the Apostolos text in Romanian

Table 16: Examples of amplification in the Apostolos text

Table 17: Use of the technique of amplification in Coresi’s Apostolos

Table 18: The rendering of the Slavonic perfective in Romanian Psalters

Table 19: The treatment of singular nouns referring to body parts in the Hurmuzaki Psalter

Table 20: The treatment of plural nouns referring to courts, ways and dwellings in the Hurmuzaki Psalter

Acknowledgements

It is perhaps fitting that the section written last appears first. Those who carried me through the long arc of this project deserve pride of place.

My deepest thanks go to my D.Phil. supervisors, Professors Martin Maiden and Ralph Cleminson, whose guidance has been unfailingly generous and whose patience has been nothing short of heroic. Their advice on methodology, philology, linguistic analysis, and – crucially – realistic timelines has been indispensable. Whenever I said ‘a week’ (or ‘a month’ or ‘a term’), they wisely doubled it and were almost always right. I owe a particular debt to Professor Mary MacRobert, my ‘unofficial third supervisor’, whose influence predates this project and whose approach to philology is one of the reasons I went to Oxford in the first place. Her support has been constant, her encouragement steady, and her impact lasting. I am also thankful to Professor Christian Voß, who welcomed me at the Department of Slavonic and Hungarian Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin during my doctorate’s last year. He took on the role of a fourth supervisor with remarkable kindness and intellectual generosity, and his inspiration accompanied me well beyond the German capital.

My thanks extend to the librarians who guided me through the labyrinths of the many libraries that became temporary homes. I am grateful to Dr Julia Walworth at Merton College; the incunabula cataloguing project we undertook together shaped me more than I realised at the time. My appreciation also goes to the staff of the Rare Books Department at the Weston Library, and especially to Dr Francesca Galligan. And to the Bodleian’s Scan and Deliver service – I have lost count of the number of times you saved me, particularly during the pandemic. My gratitude remains equally innumerable.

This research would not have been possible without substantial financial support. I am grateful to the CEELBAS Centre for Doctoral Training for funding the first two years of my D.Phil., and to both my College and the University, which ensured I could continue my work through the turbulence of the pandemic and the final push toward completion. I also warmly thank the Lumina Quaeruntur project of the Czech Academy of Sciences – the decisive turning point in my academic path that brought this book to its final form. A particular word of gratitude goes to Dr Vladislav Knoll and Dr Markéta Kulhánková, who provided insiughtful feedback on the current work.

To the friends and colleagues who coloured these years: thank you for the conversations, the distractions, the sympathy, and the occasional reminders that there is life beyond footnotes. From my Oxford circle – Martyna, Teele, Geri, Claudio, Olmo, Marysia, Brian, Guillaume, Masha, John, Alexis, Lukas, Laurel, Kan – your companionship at every stage has meant more than you realise. Special thanks to Paulina, whose enthusiasm and perseverance I have long admired. I also cherish the memories with my rowing teammates at Merton College Boat Club and the Oxford University Women’s Lightweight Rowing Club; time in a boat remains one of my clearest and fondest memories of Oxford life.

Beyond Oxford, my gratitude extends to the friends who anchored me from afar – in my hometown and in Berlin: Luca, Marco, Francesco, Giovanni, Celeste, Antonio, Daria. Thank you for your affection and your ability to make distance seem shorter than it is.

Lastly, and most importantly, I thank those who stood beside me through the most trying stages of this journey: my parents, who have perfected the art of patient endurance and whose steady presence has been my constant reassurance.

Prague

4 December 2025

Abbreviations

1 first person

2 second person

3 third person

abbrev. abbreviation

ac. active

acc. accusative

AC Coresi’s Apostolos

adj. adjective

adv. adverb

AI Iorga Apostolos (fragment)

aor. aorist

CB Bratu Codex

conj. conjunction

CS Church Slavonic

CV Voroneț Codex

du. dual

dat. dative

def. definite

ed. edition

f. feminine

facs. facsimile

fol. folio

fut. future

gen. genitive

Gr. Greek

imv. imperative

imperf. imperfect

impf. imperfective

indef. indefinite

instr. instrumental

loc. locative

m. masculine

mis. missing

n. neuter

nom. nominative

om. omission

part. participle

pass. passive

PC Coresi’s Psalter (Romanian), 1570

PC1 Coresi’s bilingual Psalter, 1577

PC2 Coresi’s bilingual Psalter, [1588]

PCb Ciobanu Psalter

PH Hurmuzaki Psalter

pf. perfective

pl. plural

posses. possessive

p.p.p. past passive participle

prep. preposition

pres. present

pres. p.p. present passive participle

pron. pronoun

PS Scheia Psalter

ptcl. particle

PV Voroneț Psalter

r recto

R redaction

sg. singular

Sl. Slavonic

Slav. Slavic

ss. superscript

subjun. subjunctive

transl. transliteration

transcrip. transcription

v verso

v. verse

vv. verses

vis. visible

voc. vocative

CHAPTER 1 Sources and Methodology

The study of the old Romanian language and literature is a field of many surprises and unexplored paths of investigation. Although the corpus of texts to be studied is closed – by now most of the early written Romanian texts have been listed bibliographically and examined philologically – the approach to studying it can change completely our understanding of old Romanian, its linguistic development, the cultural environment within which it was first attested in a written form, its social and national significance in terms of identity. The key questions I attempt to address in this book are why and how the first literary texts in Romanian came into being, where by literary I mean non-pragmatic literature. It is well known that the first books written and printed in old Romanian were religious, mainly translations from Church Slavonic, although, depending on the kind of book, other languages also served as a source. However, what prompted such translations, which sources were used for the initial translations and later during the revision processes, and in what manner these texts were rendered into Romanian are all topics that received only partial scholarly attention, mainly during the second half of the twentieth century. Since then, however, our approach to textual criticism has evolved, as has our historical knowledge of the Romanian lands in the late mediaeval and early modern periods. Additionally, significant work has been published on the textual tradition of the same religious books, but in languages other than Romanian, in particular on the Church Slavonic tradition. With these tools at hand, I have wanted once more to bring into focus the earliest Romanian texts, that is, texts copied in the sixteenth century, and study in greater detail their production and circulation. In order to do so, I have centred my research on the tradition of the Psalter and Apostolos texts; first, because of the primary role they play in the Christian context; and second, because of the availability of these texts in old Romanian. In structuring this book, I have dedicated one chapter to the historical background of book production in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the lands north of the Danube, while the two chapters to follow are devoted to the textual tradition of the Psalter first and then to that of the Apostolos. My final chapter examines the topic of translation and revision methods and techniques employed in rendering biblical books into old Romanian.

By way of introduction, I would like to contextualise the expression old Romanian. Old Romanian is usually periodised between the appearance of the first written texts in Romanian, that is, the beginning of the sixteenth century and 1780, when the first grammar of Romanian was printed, initiating a long period of normalisation and standardisation of the Romanian literary language (1974: 186-193; Chivu and Gheție 1997). The expression old Romanian, therefore, is linked to that of literary language, that is, to the idea of a language being used in written literature. However, in the sixteenth century and even later, up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, literary expression varied in accordance with the provenance of the author, with the varieties of Maramureș, Transylvania (Ardeal area), Wallachia, Moldavia and Banat being the dominant ones (Ivănescu 2012: 80–125). Linguistic variation and fluctuation, therefore, are two aspects which define the nature of old Romanian as a literary language. Additionally, the period from circa 1532 to 1780 has been further divided into two by Gheție (1982b: 67), and similarly by Coteanu (1981): an initial phase between 1532 and 1640, when textual witnesses to main variants of old Romanian language start circulating, and which hints at the existence of a literary language preceding the sixteenth century; and a second phase between 1640 and 1780, during which we see the consolidation of the dialectal variants through the activity of the printing press and a mutual linguistic influence across these variants. This last period, therefore, is also characterised by an initial movement towards linguistic unification of the literary norm. Gheție’s periodisation of the development of old Romanian establishes the time framework of this dissertation, dedicated to the first of the two periods and to the very first appearance of old Romanian as a literary language.