Register for a CSMC lecture
Thursday, 1 December 2022, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm (CET)
Warburgstraße 26, 20354 Hamburg, Room 0001 (Pavilion) and online
The Beauty of the Canon: Towards a Syntax of the Codex in Slavic Manuscripts
Dr Susana Torres Prieto (IE University, Spain)
The linguistic canon of Old Church Slavonic consists of nine manuscripts, one of which is a palimpsest. They are all dated before 1100 and they are mainly written in South Slavic both in Glagolitic and Cyrillic. While this classification is exclusively linguistic, and conventional, several different techniques of copying, binding and organising the text are clearly ascertainable. While a description of their features has been long been available, a detailed study on how these features are related to the content of the codices, their functionality or their geographic distribution is still to be carried out. Slavic medieval monastic culture provides the perfect environment for this type of research because the production aspects, the questions of authorship and the target readership of the very same artefacts were under the control of the same closed community. Taking these few manuscripts as a case study, and comparing them with those excluded from the canon, I aim to show that it is possible to understand and explain the material aspects of manuscripts as related to their textual contents and the intended function of the very sane artefacts.