From Moravia to Pskov: Text and Extratexts of the St. Sophia Triodion

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of a previously unpublished caption to the drawing in the Triodion manuscript Nr. 84 of the collection of the Cathedral of St Sophia in the Russian National Library, St Petersburg, and to the study of paleographic, orthographic and linguistic features of this codex. Based on paleographic data, the Sophia Triodion should date back to the second half of the 14th century. The identification of one of the handwritings of the manuscript with the main handwriting of the Service Menaia Nr. 101, 106, and 111 from the collection of the Synodal Typography in the Russian State Archives of Early Acts, Moscow, allows placing the codex Soph. 84 in the circle of manuscripts associated with the famous Pskov scriptorium of Andrei, priest of the St. Nicholas Church. The orthographic analysis of the handwritings presented in Soph. 84 shows that the scribes of most of the manuscript (before fol. 199 and after fol. 230) are opposed as rather conservative for the 14th century to the scribes who copied the ff. 199–230. Perhaps the scribes of this “conservative&8j1; part sought to accurately convey the orthographic features of the ancient antigraph of Triodion, which, as some researchers believe, dates back to the Moravian period of the development of Slavic writing; the latter thesis is confirmed by some Western Slavic linguistic features preserved by the text of the Soph. 84. At the same time, all four scribes have interspersed phonetic dialectisms: tsokanye (ts–ch merger), zhg < *zdj/*zg(i) and a single example of the merger of whistling and hushing consonants – the most important argument in favor of the Pskov origin of the manuscript.