The Kazan Gospel of the 14th Century in the Circle of Genetically Close Lectionaries

Abstract

This article summarizes the earlier research aimed to determine the scope of closely related lectionaries for the Kazan Gospel of the 14 th century. For this purpose, the methodology of linguistic, textual, and structural markers selection was applied. At the first stage, a comparison was made on a number of similar manuscripts regarding the most striking deviations from the standard text invariant in the Kazan Gospel (that is, language markers, which are errors, typos, text gaps and inserts, rare lexical variations, grammatical nuances, etc.). Then we compared more voluminous text fragments representing selected readings of the annual circle of varying degrees of significance (textual markers). Based on these comparisons, a group of textually similar manuscripts was studied from the point of view of their lectionary structure (according to structural markers). As a result, the hypothesis about the affinity of the Kazan manuscript with the full lectionaries of the State Historical Museum collection (the Synodal collection, no. 65), and of the Russian National Library collection (the Pogodins collection, no. 17), was confirmed. This result helped to determine more accurately the place of creation of the Kazan Gospel (probably Kirillo-Belozersky monastery), as well as to analyze the reasons for the discrepancies between the three manuscripts. The data obtained made it possible to single out a group of manuscripts belonging to one tradition within the framework of textology of Slavic lectionaries of the Mstislav type, which may be useful for their further research.