Cyrillic Manuscripts
Script and Language, Scribes and Collections
Summary
This volume is the outcome of a project initiated by the Balkan History Association.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Halftitle Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Graphic Changes in the Cyrillic Script: A Case Study of Three Documents from the Croatian State Archive in Dubrovnik
- 2. Early Romanian Cyrillic in the Context of Church Slavonic Spelling
- 3. Early Modern Croatian Cyrillic Lectionaries as Mirrors of Dialect Perception: The Example of the Leipzig Lectionary
- 4. The Slavonic Translation and Textual Tradition of Hesychius of Sinai’s Capita de Temperantia et virtute (CPG 7862)
- 5. Towards a Textual History of the Sredna-Gora Translation of Damaskēnòs Stоudítēsʼs Treasure: The Etropole Connection
- 6. Monastic Book Inventories as a Source for the Aesthetics of the Book in Early Modern Russia
- 7. Towards a Reconstruction of the Library of Slavic Manuscripts at the Wallachian Snagov Monastery
- 8. South Slavic Manuscript Paratexts as Evidence for the Production and use of Books during the Ottoman Period
- Notes on Contributors
- Index of Manuscripts and Documents
- General Index
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number
LCCN: 2025909143
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
The German National Library lists this publication in the German
National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG
Cover Image: Old Church Slavonic texts
© KODEKS - University Bamberg
ISSN 2768-7554 (print)
ISBN 9781636676272 (hardback)
ISBN 9781636676289 (ebook)
ISBN 9781636676296 (epub)
DOI 10.3726/b21149
© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne
Published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, USA
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Contents
Antoaneta Granberg, Georgi Parpulov and Andrea Radošević
Kristian Paskojević
2. Early Romanian Cyrillic in the Context of Church Slavonic Spelling
Vladislav Knoll
Ivana Eterović and Vuk-Tadija Barbarić
Anissava Miltenova
Olga M. Mladenova
6. Monastic Book Inventories as a Source for the Aesthetics of the Book in Early Modern Russia
Ekaterina Sergeevna Simonova and Denis Olegovich Tsypkin
7. Towards a Reconstruction of the Library of Slavic Manuscripts at the Wallachian Snagov Monastery
Alexandru Pascal
Tatiana Nikolova-Houston
Illustrations
Figures
Figure 1.1Dubrovnik’s letter to Đurađ II Stracimirović Balšić, 14 April 1396.
Figure 1.2Radonja’s letter to Dubrovnik, 21 October 1376.
Figure 1.3Dabiživ Čihorić’s letter to Dubrovnik, ca 1380–90.
Figure 1.4Four-line pattern and letter module of the Cyrillic diplomatic minuscule.
Figure 1.5Appearance of the four-line pattern in the DĐS.
Figure 1.6Appearance of the four-line pattern in the RD.
Figure 1.7Appearance of the four-line pattern in the DČD.
Figure 1.8Letter ō with superscripted colon in the DĐS.
Figure 1.9Use of punctuations and blank spaces in the RD.
Figure 1.10Example of scriptura continua in the DČD with marked word endings.
Figure 1.11Superscripts in the DČD –ōdь, zapovidili.
Figure 7.1Moscow, Russian State Library, ф. 98 (Е. Е. Еgorov’s collection), № 949, fol. 1r.
Figure 7.2Moscow, Russian State Library, ф. 98 (Е. Е. Еgorov’s collection), № 949, fol. 216v.
Figure 7.3Moscow, Russian State Library, ф. 98 (Е. Е. Еgorov’s collection), № 1308, fol. 1r.
Figure 7.4Moscow, Russian State Library, ф. 98 (Е. Е. Еgorov’s collection), № 1308, fol. 32r.
Figure 7.5Moscow, Russian State Library, ф. 98 (Е. Е. Еgorov’s collection), № 1308, fol. 90r.
Figure 7.6Moscow, Russian State Library, ф. 98 (Е. Е. Еgorov’s collection), № 1308, fol. 125r.
Figure 8.1Sofia, EHAI 489, Gospel, fol. 66r.
Figure 8.2Sofia, EHAI 485, Menaion (1602), colophon showing the invocatio.
Figure 8.3Sofia, EHAI 137, copy of Paisius’s History (1771), colophon.
Figure 8.4Sofia, EHAI 243, Gospelbook, fol. 271v.
Figure 8.5Sofia, EHAI 134, Damaskin, colophon.
Figure 8.6Sofia, EHAI 3, Psalter, seventeenth century.
Figure 8.7Sofia, EHAI 1521, Vita and Service of St Nicholas of Sofia, fol. IIb infra.
Figure 8.8Sofia, EHAI 137, a copy of Paisius’s History, reader’s note.
Figure 8.9Sofia, EHAI 92, Menaion, a note from AD 1792.
Tables
Table 1.4Abbreviations and ligatures in the DĐS.
Table 1.5Abbreviations and ligatures in the RD.
Table 2.1Correspondences to Romanian /ja/ and /e̯a/.
Table 2.2Rendering of Romanian /ja/ -/e̯a/.
Table 2.3Rendering of /ə/–/ɨ/.
Table 2.4Spelling of the /ja/ -/e̯a/.
Table 2.5Prevailing treatment of /ə/–/ɨ/.
Table 2.6Spelling of /ja/ -/e̯a/.
Table 2.7Comparison of the treatment of /ə/–/ɨ/.
Table 2.8Spelling of /ja/ -/e̯a/.
Table 4.1Comparison between SlavHes 1ed and translation A: addition of text.
Table 4.5Comparission between SlavHes 2, SlavHes 1ed and SlavHes 1: approximate translation.
Table 4.7Comparission between SlavHes 1ed, SlavHes 2 and SlavHes 3: Paisius Velichkovski redaction.
Table 5.1Comparison between fragments of the two versions of 1-A, 2-CB and 6-PS.
Table 5.2Select distinctive features of the Sredna-Gora translation of § 2: 419 -75/ § 18: 227 -85.
Table 5.3Select distinctive features of Sredna-Gora translation of § 2: 621 -60/ § 11: 1 -62.
Table 5.4Select distinctive features of the outputs of the participants in the translation team.
Table 8.1Content analysis, the first level of analysis of the corpus.
Acknowledgments
This volume, Cyrillic Manuscripts: Script and Language, Scribes and Collections is a project initiated by the Balkan History Association in late autumn 2021. It was developed in collaboration with the Old Church Slavonic Institute in Zagreb, Croatia, and the Department of Languages and Literatures of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. This is the first volume on Cyrillic manuscripts in the series South-East European History published by Peter Lang in conjunction with the Balkan History Association. Ten authors from seven countries have contributed chapters that collectively cover a broad research area – the Cyrillic manuscript heritage of the Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period (ca 1000–1600).
I am grateful to Stanislav (Methodius) Voloshchenko, Archimandrite of the Ecumenical Throne and a member to the Balkan History Association, from whom the idea for the volume originated. I would like to thank those who supported the project in various ways or who offered advice and suggestions that contributed significantly to this volume and motivated the need for its publication. In this regard, it is worth mentioning two other members of the Balkan History Association, Anca Libidov (Bucharest, Romania) and Alexander Okhrimenko (Kyiv School of Economics) as well as Vladislav Knoll (Department of Old Church Slavonic and Byzantine Studies, Institute of Slavonic Studies, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague), Peter Žeňuch and Svetlana Šašerina (Ján Stanislav Institute of Slavistics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava), and Viacheslav Lytvynenko (Charles University, Prague).
Mihai Dragnea, May 2025
Introduction
Antoaneta Granberg, Georgi Parpulov and Andrea Radošević
The volume includes chapters on Cyrillic texts used in Western as well as Eastern Christian countries. A broad insight into Cyrillic literacy is given, encompassing religious and legal texts, their transmission and their language. The reader will benefit from research results in different subject areas and from various methods of investigating Cyrillic manuscripts, book production, text creation, translation, transmission, text typology, language features, palaeography, the perceptions of the texts by their creators, their readers and by people involved in the dissemination of Cyrillic books.
The first chapter, Graphic changes in the Cyrillic script: A case study of three documents from the Croatian State Archive in Dubrovnik, by Kristian Paskojević, focuses on three documents from the late fourteenth century in the Croatian State Archive in Dubrovnik. Cyrillic was for centuries used as a diplomatic script in Dubrovnik. Three lesser-known and previously understudied documents are analysed as representative examples of grapholinguistic-based palaeographic research. The article employs several palaeographic categories: letter coordination in the linear system and the characteristics of the script; special letter forms and binding of letters in the text; and word dividers, use of blank space and separation of words in texts and ligatures and abbreviations. The aim of the study is to investigate the regularities of a standardized scribal style and the conclusion is that the graphetic changes in the material correspond to those of Cyrillic diplomatic minuscule. Minor scribal morphological letter characteristics, usual for all handwriting, are also found in this version of the Cyrillic script.
Early Romanian Cyrillic in the context of Church Slavonic spelling, by Vladislav Knoll, focuses on orthographic systems in contact. The chapter discusses different approaches found in Romanian words and texts from the sixteenth century. Possible reasons for adopting or abandoning different spelling strategies are discussed from the perspective of imitation of Church Slavonic. Romanian scribes and authors tried to find the most appropriate means to record their language among the Galician-Volhynian, Tŭrnovo/ Bulgarian and Serbian orthographic systems. These authors sometimes simply took the word in its original spelling when using Church Slavonic loanwords. Church Slavonic spelling rules were at the same time also applied to words of Romance origin. While creating their own tradition, the Romanians had to face the issue of the existence of homophonic Cyrillic letters whose distribution was more or less stabilized in Church Slavonic texts but rather variable in chancery texts.
In Early modern Croatian Cyrillic lectionaries as mirrors of dialect perception: The example of the Leipzig Lectionary, Ivana Eterović and Vuk-Tadija Barbarić provide an example of the indirect approach to the historical study of language. This study contributes to the development of research methods in the field of historical perceptual dialectology, a subbranch of folk linguistics which investigates the thoughts, beliefs and attitudes that non-linguists have about their dialect landscapes. The sources of this study are two early modern Croatian lectionaries: the Čakavian Bernardin Lectionary that was printed in Latin script in 1495 and the Štokavian Leipzig Lectionary, a manuscript dated around 1550–70 that represents the Cyrillic adaptation of the Bernardin Lectionary. By comparing biblical passages from these two textual witnesses, the authors determine which language features were subjected to adaptation in the Štokavian version of the original Čakavian text. The main differences are attested on the phonological and morphophonematic levels and the adaptation is conducted rather systematically, although it is almost never entirely consistent. This chapter contributes to the understanding of how the copyists perceived the borders of their dialect: that is what they felt strictly belonged to it and what they considered a more general linguistic heritage shared by different dialects.
The Slavonic translation and textual tradition of Hesychius of Sinai’s Capita de temperantia et virtute (CPG 7862), by Anissava Miltenova, deals with the manuscript tradition of the Slavonic translation from Greek of Hesychius of Sinaiʼs Capita de temperantia et virtute. The Slavonic translation has been attested in Bulgarian, Serbian, Russian, Moldavian and Wallachian manuscripts. This work, in terms of composition, belongs to the type of anthologies composed of chapters (kephalaia): that is, short admonitory paragraphs whose numbering is associated with numerical symbolism. The Slavonic translation survives in over thirty copies, divided in four groups. Its transmission is investigated as a source for identifying the connections and the exchange of translated works among Mount Athos, Tŭrnovo, other Balkan literary centres such as the Dečani Monastery, Moldova and Russia. The flourishing of ascetic literature strengthens the ideological principles in the spiritual life of Orthodox Christians and reveals the common outlook and deep connections among their cultures.
Details
- Pages
- XII, 216
- Publication Year
- 2025
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781636676289
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781636676296
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781636676272
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21149
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2025 (July)
- Keywords
- Cyrillic manuscripts Old Church Slavonic translations
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2025. X, 208 pp., 27 b/w ill., 26 tables.
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