How Many Books Did F. Skorina Publish in Prague?

Abstract

The advent of the printing press proved to be a decisive factor in the cultural development of mankind as a whole. In Eastern Europe, the complex path to the new information technology had its own specific characteristics: revolutionary technology was first used for the needs of East Slavs in 1517–1519 in the Czech kingdom and from there it was transferred to Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1521–1522. The process of developing the printed word is linked to the figure of Francis Skorina (1470–1551), who, after the Congress of Vienna, was given the opportunity to become a book publisher in Prague. The focus of the proposed study is a corpus of Cyrillic printed monuments, which together tell an entertaining story of equal cultural and technological cooperation in the first quarter of the 16th century. In the context of mastering and adapting the latest technology, it is noteworthy that the Cyrillic Prague editions are characterized by exceptionally high polygraphy quality, which exceeds the level of Czech printing of the first half of the 16th century. Therefore, they are nowadays regarded not only as valuable works of East Slavic cultural heritage but also as outstanding monuments of Czech printing (významné bohemikální památky). From the perspective of encompassing philology (celostní filologie), from a modern methodological base and a new phase in the development of Prague functional structuralism, the article raises the question of how many of these printed monuments intended for the East Slavic reader were published in Prague at that time.