St. Jerome's Homilies in the Medieval Old-Church Slavonic Translations (in Proprium de tempore)

Abstract

Readers from the homilies of St. Jerome were translated from Latin into Church Slavonic, probably when the Church Slavonic version of the breviary was created in the mid-13th century, when Pope Innocent IV. approved the use of Slavic liturgy by the Benedictines in Senj and Krk. The authors of the Croatian-Glagolitic breviary used older Old-Church Slavonic translations of the biblical text, other texts – among them the homilies of St. Hieronymus – were translated straight from the Latin breviary, so we can trace in them the characteristic elements of actively used Croatian Church Slavonic. In this paper, we review the authenticity of the Jerome’s authorship of the texts in the breviary and show that some of the lexical elements of the translation of homilies are the same as those of the biblical texts in the Croatian text books of the southern textual group.

Keywords

• homilies
• glagolitic language
• breviary
• translation
• st. jerome