Scripta & e-Scripta vol. 12, 2013

able of Contents of the issue Scripta 12 (2013)

This article considers an electronic edition of the Skalar Manuscript codex, which came into being around 1643. The original is held in the National and University Library in Ljubljana. The Manuscript codex contains four Slovene-language texts: three translations from German and a short, incomplete composition. In view of the fact that the Manuscript is from the territory of the so-called Western Slavs, it comes as no surprise that it features primarily Western and Central European themes and influences. The first part of the article briefly introduces the author, provides key information on the text’s contents, cites authors that Skalar used, and presents the critical textual background for his translation of the Pseudo-Bonaventure’s composition. The second part presents the electronic, scholarly critical edition of the Skalar Manuscript, which contains a facsimile of the text, and diplomatic and critical transcriptions, with substantial studies appended. The edition will be placed on the eZISS site, Elektronske znanstvenokritične izdaje slovenskega slovstva: http://nl.ijs.si/e-zrc/ (Scholarly Digital Editions of Slovenian Literature), along with other scholarly critical editions of Slovenian literature prepared by the Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies of the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), in cooperation with the Jožef Stefan Institute’s Department of Knowledge Technologies (Inštitut Jožef Stefan, Odsek za tehnologije znanja).

The proposed notes to the chronology of the Codex Suprasliensis were provoked by the "Rediscovery" of this manuscript in the project of UNESCO (2009-2011), Institute for Literature, BAS. The electronic edition of the codex gave grounds of a new analysis, and with much more sophisticated technology and expectation to create a new annotated dictionary. Most of the authors of the publications in anthology “Rediscovery: Bulgarian Codex Suprasliensis of 10th century” (Sofia, 2012) suggested an earlier composition and production of the Codex Suprasliensis ‒ about the 970s. The author argues that the model of the handwriting of the Codex Suprasliensis lies on the basis of both the high and the low Cyrillic uncial. Her analysis includes details of the outline of graphemes and decoration of the Codex Suprasliensis as compared to the most important early Cyrillic manuscripts. The author also seeks terminus ante quem / post quem for the character set compared with epigraphic materials. She emphasizes that the handwriting of the Codex Suprasliensis remains unique – until a model of the early Cyrillic script is reconstructed, a model that depends probably on the early Greek tradition/ canon of graphemes. There is a good prospect for future research, because of the study of the corpus of the Slavonic liturgical books (reading menaia, triodia, apostoloi and others) nowadays: this gives good grounds for further development of a Slavic Cyrillic paleography and codicology.

The goal of this article is to analyze an early 16th - century Slavonic copy of the Legend of how the Bulgarian Zographou Monastery on Mount Athos was founded. This text represents an integral part of the sacred history of the Holy Mountain, known under the title Πάτρια (Patria Athonensia). In the beginning of the 16th century (1508), hieromonk Gabriel, at that time notary of the Protaton Church at Karyai, translated into Slavonic of Serbian recension a cycle of mutually connected texts on the foundation of Holy Mountain and some of its monasteries, which he found in the Greek written tradition of the Hagiorite Patria. The analysis in this paper is focused on the most archaic South Slavonic copy with Gabriel’s translation in miscellany № 733 from the middle of the 16th century, which makes part of Kovačević’s collection, held in the Serbian National Library in Belgrade. The Legend about the foundation of the Zographou Monastery is analyzed in the light of the concepts of “cultural memory”, “spiritual identity“, and “historical tradition”. The authors express a deep gratitude to their Serbian colleagues Vlada Stanković and Tatjana Subotin-Golubović for the given opportunity to use the digital copy of the manuscript, as well as to Dmitrij Bulanin, whose new research Афон в древнерусской письменности до конца XVI в. (Словарь книжников и книжности Древней Руси. Вып.2, части 1–2. М., 2012, 429–763), appeared at the same time as the deposition of the current article, represents a solid base for further investigations. 

The article discusses the events in the Balkans by the end of the 13th century when the Serbian ruler Milutin managed to get special status after marriage to a five-year-old daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus II, Simonis. The marriage of Emperor Milutin with the emperor’s daughter radically changes the position and policy of the Serbian king. After 1299, Milutin emerged as a strong opponent of the empire to be defeated by military force, but at the same time, potentially very valuable friend and ally, by whom Byzantine influence can be spread more and more widely in the Balkans. After that King Milutin becomes governance model for his successors, especially for her grandson Stefan Dušan, who ascend even higher in the hierarchy of Balkan rulers. Dušan declared himself emperor in 1345 at the height of the civil war in Byzantium, with claims to dominate both in Serbia and over Byzantium. Dušan managed to get from the nineteen-year-old emperor John the Fifth Palaeologus, the son of Andronicus III, recognition of his imperial status by formula (which follows closely the model prepared for Milutin): for John the Fifth Dušan was an emperor of Serbia and "favorite uncle", but this is not a temporary solution to the young and inexperienced emperor. This formula is forced under political pressure and is expression of Byzantine official position to the neighbor ally and confirms the evolution to the Serbian rulers by Byzantine emperors and the change, which is implemented earlier through Milutin’s policy.

An insufficiently studied monastic florilegium survives in the parchment manuscript No. 382 from the collection of the Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos. The manuscript is dated to the end of the 13th– beginning of the 14th centu. It was written with Raška orthography, with traces of an earlier Old Church Slavonic protograph. The book was made up of two separate manuscripts (fols. 1–197 and fols. 198–259) with separate pagination of quires. The text of the first part was written in two columns by one scribe. The second manuscript (fol. 198 till the end) is a copy of the so-called Zlatostruj of Tsar Symeon. In the first part of the manuscript (on fols. 1–67) there are texts enumerated from 1 to 154 that are attributed to many authors (by name, if mentioned at all, as most are anonymous): John Chrysostom, Basil of Caesarea, Maximos the Confessor, Hypatios of Ephesus, Hippolytus of Rome, Аnastasios of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Palladios, Ephrem the Syrian, Isidore of Pelousion, Theodore the Studite, and others. The article presents results from text-critical analysis of some translated into Old Church Slavonic works in the first part of this manuscript, the study of which is largely due to the kindly provided materials to the author in Hilandar Research Center (Columbus, Ohio, United States). In particular, the following texts are examined 1) Moscow florilegium (Florilegium Mosquense) (fols. 60c–64c); 2) A collection of admonitory aphorisms for moral perfection, in Greek alphabetic order (fols. 64C–66d); 3) Instruction on the gratitude to God and the prayer (fols. 66d–67b); 4) Instruction on the Ten Commandments, only fragments of which are found in Hilandar 382 (fols. 67b–67c-d, no ending); 5) A collection of wise sayings allegedly authored by Nilus of Sinai, a fragment in Hilandar 382 (fols. 59a–60c). The study identifies their Byzantine archetypes, characterizes translation techniques and traces back the transmission of the texts from the time of their creation (probably the middle or second half of the 10th century) to the end of the 16th century.

Manuscript of the collection in the monastery “St Catherine” Sinai Gr . 973, 12th c., and Archimedes Palimpsest (copied in the 13th century on top of reused parchment) contain very similar features of the Palestinian rite of marriage. Each of these two euchologia preserved texts constituting evidence of combination between Constantinople liturgical tradition and local materials. However, along with this, even the local materials appear to be combinations of different sources. In other words, the local texts in these two euchologia cannot have originated from a single original of the wedding ritual. There is a combination of multiple components of alternative or variant practices, some of which are in the same euchologia. The variety of wedding practices spread along with variant practices for marriage in other sources of the region, Sinai Gr. 957 (10th c.), Sinai Gr. 958 (11th c.) - both in Palestine and in the Georgian euchologia. Because of the wide variety of wedding practices found in Palestinian sources and a relatively limited number of early texts for marriage ritual, it is difficult to establish the exact origin of many local traditions in these manuscripts. One thing is certain - there is a wide variety of texts for marriage among Orthodox Christians in the Middle East. Despite the variety of practices Sinai Gr. 973 and the text of the Archimedes Palimpsest in euchologia helped to understand common characteristics of the ritual of marriage in this specific region.

ll Cathars accepted the New Testament as divinely inspired, and some of them also admitted the Wisdom Books and the Prophetical Books of the Old Testament to their scriptural canon; but (except for the school of John of Lugio) they all rejected the Pentateuch and the Historical Books. This created a two-fold problem for them. First, the writers of the Biblical books which they did accept regarded the Pentateuch and the Historical Books of the Old Testament as divinely inspired and frequently cited them as authoritative. Secondly, the Cathars lived in a society which considered that the Pentateuch and the Historical Books of the Old Testament were the most accurate factual record of human history. In this paper I have tried to explore how the Cathars responded to those challenges.

The Bojana Church of St Nicholas and St Panteleemon of 1259 is a comparatively well-preserved monument of Bulgarian mediaeval art which has attracted the interest of a number of experts from various disciplines in the arts and humanities above all with the portraits of two lay couples depicted in the narthex: of the Bulgarian Tsar Constantine Tich Asen (1257-1277) and his wife Irene, and of the donors (ktetors), Sebastocrator Kalojan and his wife Desislava. The experience of a number of Bulgarian scientists from the last century to seek a hint of fate donors of the Boyana Church in images of Miracle of St. Nicholas with three generals (one third of all or six of the 18 scenes), provoked the author of the article to draw a parallel with similar Byzantine monuments of the 11th-15th c. There is a preference to present the Miracle in several scenes in all of them - iconography of constituent scenes remains unsolved up to now in essence and variation in individual interpretations is depending on the selected number of stages and the order of their presentation. The choice of the first scene, the sequence in producing of six episodes, the shifted center of events compared to the Life of the saint and the overall context in which the story is showed in frescoes in the narthex warrants to determine the miracle with the three generals in the Boyana Church in parrallel with the Miracle with the dream of the Emperor Constantine the Great. Consequences of a new interpretation made there of one of the miracles of St. Nicholas is the realization that interpretation of the mural of The Miracle of St. Nicholas with three generals in the Boyana Church from 1259 should be viewed not only as a component of the total cycle about the saint in the narthex, but the illustration that corresponds to the religious motives of the founders of the temple Kaloyan and Desislava. The approach applied here – examining the wall paintings in the Bojana Church as a “text”, as a “narrative” that expects to be “deciphered” – shows the need for a more detailed study of the figure of the author of the iconographic program who has turned, with great skill and erudition, the visual interpretation of the hagiographical narrative of St. Nicholas into one of the merits of the monument in Bojana of 1259.

The object of the article is the Latin translation of the Vita of St. Petka of Tărnovo made by Rafael Levaković from the version in Zbornik za Putnike published by Vicenzo Vuković in 1547 in Venice. This translation is precise, although the translator tends to use most eloquent style when writing in Latin. An interesting peculiarity of Levaković’s translation is probably the intentional aspiration to adhere to the gender of the words in Patriarch Euthymius’s original, to find a Latin word of the same gender as its counterpart in the original. Out of approximately 320 nouns translated, 180 have complete concurrence of gender. Moreover, there is a tendency to render consistently nouns which are of feminine gender and end in -ица with Latin nouns of feminine gender ending in -trix, -tricis, i.е. there is some consistency on the level of declension. Examples: застѫпьница f. – protectrix, cis f. In a similar way masculine nouns ending in –ьць (nomina auctoris) are translated with Latin words of masculine gender ending in –tor, -toris, for example самодрьжьць m. – imperator, oris m. In the translation there is no need of calques, because both the Slavonic and Latin were Christian literary languages in the 17th c. with a long tradition and well developed system of abstract nouns denoting Christian concepts. Rafael Levaković’s translation of the Vita of St. Petka is a precious source for the cultural connections in Europe in the 17th c. A rare attempt such as a translation from Slavonic into Latin undoubtedly is not only of interest for scholars, dealing with this material, but also a cultural fact of the Late Medieval times.

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Reviews / In Stolis Repromissions. Saints and Sainthood in Central and Eastern Europe. Edited by Adelina Angusheva-Tihanov, Margaret Dimitrova, Rossina Kostova, and Rossen R. Malchev. Sofia: ROD, 2012, 520 pp.

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