The Elaborate Details in a Medieval Manuscript

The Summary of Cannon Law from the second half of the 14th century was preserved on 324 parchment leaves.

A treatise on canon law, full of vivacious drolleries made after the French example.

Drolleries, also called grotesques, are small, decorative images, often containing various hybrid creatures in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. They are usually unrelated to the content, but testify to the illuminator’s ingenuity and imagination.

One of the most luxuriously illuminated medieval manuscripts in Slovenia. The arcade title page, the title page, the initials, the miniatures, and the drolleries are also in gold and silver.

One of the authors, illuminator Nicolaus hid his name amidst the ivy branches in the lunettes at the top of the page.

Nicolaus used red, blue, white, green, yellow, brown, orange, and violet colours. There are scenes of rabbit and foxhunting with dogs on the margins.

Surrounding the medallion with Saint Augustine on the throne, is a ribbon, containing the name of Prior Herman from Bistra, who commissioned the manuscript.

The initials are surrounded with stylised vines and naturalistically depicted animals: rabbit, dog, monkey, peacock and other birds.

A miniature foldable calendar, consisting of 36 parts is an exceptional rarity. Each month contains depictions of typical peasant’s work, zodiac signs, saints, and feasts.

A month with weeks, saints, and the zodiac sign.

The Old Church Slavonic language based on a South Macedonian dialect, which was the original language of early Church liturgy, gradually began to acquire the role of literary language in the Slavic lands from the 9th century onwards. It retained that role until the end of the Middle Ages, when individual national languages began to evolve. The earliest Old Church Slavonic texts resulted from the missionary work of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, who began to spread Christianity among the Slavic peoples in a language, which was understandable to local population.

The earliest Old Church Slavonic manuscripts were written in two alphabets: Glagolitic, which the experts ascribe to Cyril, and the slightly younger Cyrillic alphabet, which was most probably developed by his disciples.

Most of the Cyrillic and Glagolitic manuscripts come from Jernej Kopitar’s and Sigismund Zois’s collection, which were acquired by the Lyceum Library during the 1820s and 1840s.

Codex Suprasliensis is one of the oldest and most valuable Slavic linguistic monuments, written in Eastern Bulgaria in the 1st half of the 11th century. 118 leaves of the manuscript are now in the National and university Library of Slovenia, while 16 leaves are kept at the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, and 151 are at the National Library of Poland in Warsaw. The entire document is inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World registry.

The text is written in elegant, broad Cyrillic script. It contains 24 hagiographies, 23 homilies and a prayer.

Missale Romanum Glagoliticum contains colourful, richly decorated initials, several splendid miniatures and even some full-page illustrations.

It was written in Beram in Istria. The script is angular Glagolitic.

Medieval texts in Slovenian language date from the end of the 10th to the end of the 15th century. The number of texts, written during the period certainly exceeded the number of those, which have been preserved. The most important monuments attesting to Slovenian language’s characteristics and development during the Middle Ages are: the Freising Manuscripts, a couple of chivalrous poetry fragments, the Klagenfurt Manuscript, the Stična Manuscript, the Cividale Manuscript, the Udine Manuscript, the Škofja Loka Manuscript, a couple of verses from the Auersperg family archives praising female beauty, and the Stara Gora Manuscript. They all prove the early existence of Slovenians as a community with a distinctive language, which had differentiated from the Old Slavic quite early.

The Freising Manuscripts are the oldest preserved text in Slovenian language in Carolingian minuscule. It contains a short general confession form, a common prayer, and another version of a general confession form. The original is kept at the Bavarian State Library in München.

A book of psalms of the Orthodox Church in Cyrilic, printed at Crnojevič's workshop in Cetinje.

The illustrations and the initials are an interesting mixture of Venetian and Byzantine artistic traditions. The copy comes from Jernej Kopitar's collection.