Cover

Half-Title

Series

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

List of Figures

About The Authors

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

PART I: MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS AND RARE PRINTED EDITIONS

Scribal Practices, Textual Issues, and Slavic Languages

1. Cyrillic Traces in Glagolitic Manuscripts

2. Multilingualism in the Cyrillic Manuscripts and Early Prints

3. The Visual Markup of the Text in Russian Chancellery Documents from the Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries

Books, Texts, and Images

4. Visual Exegesis of Verses of the Old Testament Psalms: A Contribution to the Study of the Hermeneutic Relation Between the Text and the Image in Medieval Cyrillic Manuscripts

5. The Miniatures in the Sixteenth-Century Slavonic Codex (RGB, Tr. F. 304/III, no. 20) and their Sources in the Byzantine Manuscripts

6. Ohorodok Presviatoi Bohoroditsy (1671) as a Remarkable Sample of the Ukrainian Baroque Handwritten Book

Christian Literature and Publishing in Slavic Contexts

7. On the Subject of Publishing Cyrillic Sources in Slovakia: The Source as a Basis for Research into Intercultural Communication

8. Reception of John Chrysostom in Ukrainian Printed Literature from the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

PART II: MANUSCRIPTS AND DIGITIZATION

Paleography, Cataloguing, and Online Databases

9. The Paleographic Study of Manuscripts and the Database ‘Medieval Cyrillic Codices’: Russian Digital Resources for Manuscripts

Transcription, Visualization, and Markup

10. An Online Corpus of Old Slavonic Written Sources: Development Methods, Visualization Ways, and Markup Challenges

11. Digitizing Cyrillic Manuscripts Using Handwritten Text Recognition Technologies: Recent Developments and Future Perspectives

Cyrillic Fonts

12. A Proposal for Converting the non-Unicode Font CyrillicaOchrid1

Manuscripts and Modern Methods of Natural Science

13. Natural Scientific Methods in the Study of Medieval Written Artifacts in the Department of Manuscripts at the State Historical Museum, Moscow

Index of Names

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume, Cyrillic Manuscripts: From Medieval to Digital is a project initiated by the Balkan History Association in late summer 2021. It is the second volume on Slavonic manuscripts in the series “South-East European History” published by Peter Lang on behalf of the Association. The volume was developed in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy of the Protestant Theological Faculty, Charles University in Prague.

The initial idea began with two bright Ukrainian scholars: Alexander Okhrimenko from Kyiv School of Economics, and Stanislav (Methodius) Voloshchenko, Archimandrite of the Ecumenical Throne. Both are members of the Balkan History Association. Okhrimenko was the one who initially described this project, and the introduction that follows owes much to his early vision. At some point, the project suffered a pause and was rejuvenated by the current editorial team led by another Ukrainian scholar, Viacheslav V. Lytvynenko, research fellow in the Department of Philosophy of the Protestant Theological Faculty, Charles University in Prague.

I would like to thank those who supported the project before and after the break, or who offered advice and suggestions that contributed significantly to its preparation and motivated the need for its publication. In this regard, in addition to the editors of this volume, it is worth mentioning Yavor Miltenov (†), former professor at the Institute of Bulgarian Language of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Dușița Ristin (Department of Russian and Slavic Philology of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest), Elka Jaceva-Ulcar (Institute for the Macedonian Language “Krste Misirkov” of Ss Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje), Mary Allen “Pasha” Johnson (Hilandar Research Library, The Ohio State University), Andrej Bojadžiev (Department of Cyril and Methodius Studies of the Faculty of Slavic Studies, Sofia University), and Svetlana Šašerina (Ján Stanislav Institute of Slavistics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava).

Mihai Dragnea, June 2025

INTRODUCTION

Cyrillic manuscripts from the Slavic world have been given far less attention by Western scholars than Greek and Latin manuscripts as the more traditional objects of study. Furthermore, the researchers who do study Cyrillic manuscripts often tend to publish their works in different Slavic languages rather than using more common Western languages. As a result, Cyrillic manuscripts often appear exotic to those in the West, and there is a profound lack of interaction between Slavic and Western researchers. To take just a couple of examples, during the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in 2021, there were 112 papers dedicated to Latin texts, 21 to Greek, and only 3 to Slavic. Earlier, at the Eighteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies in Oxford in 2019 – which gathered nearly a thousand international scholars of patristics – there was only 1 paper on the Slavic reception.

While the modern focus in research is shifting from catalog descriptions to social and material history, from the textuality to the functions of a book as a specific medium, such new tendencies in the research of Cyrillic manuscripts are almost unrepresented in the English-speaking international community. Nor is there much common knowledge about the way Slavic codices adopted Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic cultural traditions, migrated to the West, and are now stored around the world. To this day, the Union Catalogue of Cyrillic Manuscripts in British and Irish Collections, created by Ralph M. Cleminson in 1988, remains the standard in the West.

The present volume seeks to address this situation by letting Slavic researchers share their scholarship in English as the most common language in academia today. The works collected cover a wide variety of topics related to Cyrillic manuscripts and prints, focusing on the period from around 900 to 1800. They discuss – directly or indirectly – the material aspects of Cyrillic manuscripts (paleography, codicology, problems of catalogue description, early watermarks, binding); visuality relating to illumination and decoration (initials, head-pieces, borders, end-pieces, paragraphs, script as specific visuality); textuality (colophons, culture of reading, writing and early printing, text and image); migrations and collections (manuscripts’ change of place during their owners’ travels, collecting movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modern libraries, today’s collections of Cyrillic manuscripts); fragmentology (separation and damaging of codices, fragments in bindings, hypothetical and digital reconstruction of manuscripts), and digital humanities (computer-supported processing of Cyrillic artifacts, digital linguistics, machine learning approaches, HTR-models for transcriptions, multispectral macrophotography, etc.).

As follows from the title, the volume begins with the articles on medieval manuscripts and early prints, and concludes with those on digital work with manuscripts. The first part of the volume opens with three articles on scribal practices, textual issues, and Slavic languages. The article by Yavor Miltenov traces the scribal habits in the Glagolitic manuscripts from the tenth and eleventh centuries. He examines the way scribes used Cyrillic letters, words, and phrases in the text, made glosses in the margins, appended explanations to illustrations, wrote initials and titles, and misrecorded the numerical value of the letters. The article by Vladislav Knoll investigates a coexistence of different languages (particularly, Church Slavonic, Old Romanian, Greek, and Latin) and varieties (such as vernacular features) within a Cyrillic manuscript and early modern printed editions. He demonstrates several types of coexistence by exploring such elements as notes, colophons, intros, titles, and rubrics, as well as glosses, consecutive translations of fragments, and parallel rendering. The article co-authored by Angelina A. Kalashnikova and Maria E. Proskuryakova studies the visual markup of Russian chancellery documents from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The authors reveal how professional scribes used different techniques (such as initials, headings, paragraphs, dots, commas, and others) to enhance the readability and comprehensibility of documents.

Several articles explore the relationship between the text and the image. The one by Kristina Miloradović offers a ‘visual exegesis’ of the Book of Psalms by looking into the hermeneutic relationship between the text and the image in the illuminated Serbian Psalter from the late fourteenth century. The author’s findings enable her to classify the miniatures and explain their functional and semantic value. The article by Tatiana G. Popova analyzes 22 miniatures in one of the richly decorated East Slavic manuscripts from the collection of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius at the Russian State Library, dated to the years 1520–30s. Based on her study of the iconographic cycle of ‘Monastic Feats’ in the famous patristic text Ladder of Divine Ascent (Lestvitsa) by John Climacus, she shows that Russian artists enriched the Byzantine tradition of depicting penitent sinners by introducing entirely new solutions and themes. Olha V. Maksymchuk writes about two seventeenth-century manuscripts known as The Garden of the Most Holy Theotokos as an example of the Ukrainian Baroque handwritten book. She gives a codicological description of the manuscript and demonstrates a well-thought-out unity between the text and various visual components, such as illuminations and special decorative elements.

The next two articles talk about Christian literature and publishing in Slavic contexts. Peter Žeňuch’s work addresses the task of publishing Cyrillic sources in Slovakia. It discusses the importance of the Slovak space in the enculturation of the Cyrillic written heritage and examines a wide range of significant writings – administrative, historical, biblical, liturgical, legal, apologetic, educational, homiletic, apocryphal, didactic, and spiritual. Natalia P. Bondar and Viacheslav V. Lytvynenko present the first comprehensive study of John Chrysostom in Ukrainian printed literature from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. They discuss the first editions of the liturgy of John Chrysostom and trace the early printed books that made available his works on the relevant issues of the time – theological, exegetical, spiritual, polemical, and pastoral – with a special emphasis on such features as engraved images, inscriptions, decorations, and the like.

The second part of the volume deals with the issues of digital work. The first article addresses the tasks of creating online databases, cataloging, and solving paleographic problems. In this work, Maria V. Korogodina and Nadezhda N. Levchenko discuss the Russian digital resources for manuscripts and the database ‘Medieval Cyrillic Codices’. They explore the task of developing the terminology and establishing internal relationships of manuscript materials within the database, as well as the way this can help solve various paleographic issues.

Two articles take up the issues of transcription, visualization, and markup. Victor A. Baranov and Maria O. Novak offer a study on the online parallel corpus of Old East Slavic Parimeinik and discuss the development methods, visualization ways, and markup challenges. Their work focuses on issues of transcribing techniques, principles of annotation, and markup peculiarities, showing the importance of studying manuscripts as compound objects with various codicological and text-critical characteristics. Achim Rabus and Martin Meindl talk about the task of digitization of Cyrillic manuscripts by using AI-powered Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technologies. They develop and apply HTR models on the Transkribus platform to different Slavonic styles and languages, assess the performance of these models, and explore opportunities for using them with ‘smart’ functions for such tasks as expanding abbreviations, modernizing orthography, and setting correct quotation marks.

One article considers Cyrillic fonts and the issues of conversion. Written by Fabio Maion, it addresses the problem of dealing with texts that were digitized years ago and are difficult to reuse for new projects, given that the encoding of such texts is not always compliant with the Unicode standard. In light of this issue, the author proposes a conversion scheme for CyrillicaOchrid1 and shows how this font can be converted to Unicode.

Finally, the article co-authored by a team made up of a historian, physicist, chemist, and mathematician – Elena V. Ukhanova, Mikhail N. Zhizhin, Aleksandr V. Andreev, and Aleksey A. Poida – applies modern methods of natural science for the study of medieval manuscripts. They use multispectral macrophotography to visualize the data invisible to the human eye and as a result, perform such things as reading the lost scribal notes, visualizing unique Glagolitic and Byzantine palimpsests, and restoring the only lifetime portrait of the Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible.

A word of thanks is due to several organizations and people for their support of this work. We are grateful to the Balkan History Association for promoting this project, and to Peter Lang Publisher for making this volume available to our readers. Viacheslav V. Lytvynenko would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Czech Science Foundation toward the publication of this volume,¹ as well as the fellowship at Yale University, which enabled him to have the time and focus to lead this project. Achim Rabus and Małgorzata Skowronek did their work as part of a larger Polish-German project ‘Continslav’ (Orthodox Slavic Linguistic Varieties at the Threshold of Modernity: Continuity and Innovation. A Mixed-Methods Approach), which deals with medieval Cyrillic manuscripts and digital methods.² Dimiter Peev worked on this volume as part of his habilitation project at the University of Jena.

Above all, we are grateful to each of twenty-one authors, who contributed to this project. Their works are an example of exceptional scholarship and erudition. Together they represent eight different countries, including Bulgaria, Serbia, Germany, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Russia, Slovakia, and the United States. The volume will serve many different readers, including scholars, students, and librarians interested in the written heritage of the Slavic peoples; specialists in digital humanities; researchers cataloging books and material artifacts; and those who study comparative linguistics. It will also appeal to anyone studying the Christian tradition, and especially the relations between Eastern (Orthodox Cyrillic) and Western (Catholic and mostly Latin, but also Glagolitic) Christianity within the Slavic world.

We dedicate this volume to the memory of our dear colleague and friend, Yavor Miltenov, who passed away shortly before this project was completed. We are thankful to Ekaterina Dikova for writing the obituary for Yavor, which we placed before this introduction. Yavor’s mother, Anissava Miltenova – herself a renowned scholar in Slavic studies – helped us to secure the images used in Yavor’s work, and it is his paper that opens this volume.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Viacheslav V. Lytvynenko

Yale University, USA

December, 2023