Scripta & e-Scripta vol 1, 2003

Scripta & e-Scripta; Volume 1/2003; Table of Contents

Aim and Scope; Regularity; Journal Contents; Editorial Board

Monuments of Slavic written heritage such as a mixed content miscellanies or a question-and-answer composition, consist of an indefinite number of textual parts (articles) arranged in an indefinite order. It is assumed that to compose a new manuscript of this type, the scribe first copied several articles from one manuscript (the first antigraph), then from another, etc. This process is reflected textually by the fact that two or more manuscripts of the same type contain the same compound articles in the same order. This study proposes a computer system that meets the philological needs of comparing a large number of manuscripts in order to establish a typology of composition and group it according to appropriate types. The system uses only open-source standards W3C (XML, XSLT, SVG) and TEI.

Comparative studies of medieval Church Slavonic Gospel manuscripts – whether broad-scale taxonomies of textual traditions, identifications of manuscript families, or analysis of features of a single manuscript – require a large corpus of manuscripts from which a subset can be selected for comparison. This paper proposes some desiderata for an electronic collation of medieval Slavic manuscripts and discusses some anticipated philological and methodological issues that would need to be resolved during the development of the collation with computer tools. The project is base on the material from medieval menologies or calendars of saints in the Slavic Gospels.

The report examines the possibilities of electronic publication of mediaeval Slavic texts of various types, intended for teaching at the university. A distinction is made between the critical edition and editions designed for the practical gradual acquiring of linguistic and literary facts. Such publications should fill the gap that exists concerning the mediaeval Slavic texts in electronic form and provide an opportunity to visualize samples of manuscripts. This will increase the opportunity to learn about the essence of Slavic heritage.

Doxae are an organic part of Slavic hymnography. They are especially important for the cults of the South Slavic saints Petka Tărnovska, Stefan Dechanski, Sava Srbski, Simeon Srbski, etc., as in most cases they are original works by Slavic authors. The article summarizes the results of the archeographic and palaeographic work of the author in 1996-2002 in the Kopitar Collection in Ljubljana, Slovenia, exporting unknown and unstudied data from the manuscripts.

‘A Useful Tale about the Latins’ is a detailed historical account of the split between Rome and Eastern Churches and it belongs to the underresearched corpus of Slavic translations by Byzantine anti-Catholic texts which formed gradually between 11th and 14th c. The paper presented firs attempt to collect copies, to study the origin and transmission of the text. The author described a few redactions and respective witnesses to every redaction, their specific features and history of formation.

The paper introduces an unknown work by Clement of Ohrid devoted to St Alexis of Rome included in the Slavic Festal Menaion ) 25, 14th c., from the collection of Monastery At Catherine, Mount Sinai (Sin. Slav. 25). The Sinai copy of the Office of St Alexis contains three stichera in mode 1 and a troparion in mode 8 in the Vesper part of the office, and a kanon in mode 8 for the Orthros. The kanon contains the name of Clement into acrostic КЛИМ.

The paper describes the interlingual asymmetry in the Bible and the Slavic translations of biblical texts. Bulgarian lexemes for ‘earth’, ‘man’, ‘Adam’, ‘blood’, ‘red’, ‘Edom’ – have no word-formation connection in the language. In Hebrew, however, these tokens are formed from a single root and based on biblical stories this paradigm is schematized, contextualized and ideologized. The development of vocabulary is reflected in the Old Slavonic translations and their understanding over the centuries.

The article analyzes a troparion from the Old Bulgarian triodion cycle by Constantine of Preslav (9th century), following the path from the textual establishment and verse analysis to the relationship between sound and meaning in the work. The principles for the organization of the text, which are independent of the musical performance, are presented. The two-way relationship between text, verse and the specifics of the hymnographic genre is demonstrated.

The article analyzes the punctuation in the Life of St. John of Rila by Patriarch Euftimius according to the earliest copy in the so-called Zografski Sbornik (No. 172, 14th century, monastery St George, Mount Athos). By comparison with certain earlier and later texts, several features stand out - punctuation has strictly distinguishing functions and the dots in the line separate phrases longer than in other manuscripts. This construction agrees quite well with the ancient theory of ‘period’, as it is divided into ‘kolons’ by commas and dots in the row, and the middle point graphically means its end.

The article is an attempt to track down and sup up problems related to genre terminology in the wisdom literature. A comparison is made between Greek and Slavic titles of collections of wise sentences and apophthegms in order to shed light on their genre specifics. The titles emphasize the act of selection and compilation, as well as the instructive discourse within the general notion of the literature of wisdom. Unlike the Greek nominations, the Slavic models miss the refinement of the genre forms. This situation may be a consequence of the lack of cultivated practice for the use of genre names in Slavia Orthodoxa.

The article presents a study of a manuscript No 646 from the collection of the National Library "SS Cyril and Methodius" in Sofia, known as the collection of Niketa. In terms of content, the collection is similar to the scrolls with amulets. Contains both canonical and non-canonical prayers, spell texts, talisman seals, etc. The owner has written his name everywhere, as the owner of the manuscript and the user of its apotropaic functions.

The article examines a passage from the Apocryphal Apocalypse of John the Theologian, originated probably in the 5th century in Byzantium, whose source is found in texts from the most ancient period of Christian literature. In the written sources the fragment existed in the lost work ‘Clarification of the Lord's Sentences’ by Papius of Hierapolis and in the Aversus haereses of Irenaeus of Lyons. In the course of the research, it was found that this fragment is based on a written oral tradition. an extremely ancient basis of the oral traditions that spread in Asia Minor probably even before the recording of the Gospel texts in the form in which we know them today.

Report of the ICS Commission for Computer Processing of Medieval Slavonic Manuscripts and Early Printed Books (1998 -2003) (in Russian)