About the origins and destiny of the Erlangen Manuscript

Abstract

Erlangen Manuscript of the old Serbo-Croatian folk poems is the most comprehensive and the most important collection of our decasyllable epic poems before the appearance of Vuk Karadžić. It was edited by Gerhard Gesemann in 1925 who also wrote an extensive introduction to the manuscript. This paper focuses on the circumstances under which the manuscript was created and the circumstances that brought the manuscript to the University Library in Erlangen. It has been established that it was created in the period when only one person existed who had a capacity thanks his rank to organize extensive work on recording and/or copying 217 poems that the manuscript contains. That person was General Maximilian von Petrasch who was the commander of the fortress Brod (1708-1723). The arguments that support this conclusion can be found primarily in von Petrasch’s biography (he understood “Slavonic language”, he was well liked by the grenzen, the soldiers on the Military Frontier), but also in some of the poems - firstly, in the one in which his name is mentioned, and secondly, in those poems that celebrate the battles in which Maximilian von Petrasch participated. The Erlangen Manuscript was inherited by Joseph Petrasch, the philologist and the owner of the vast library who signed his collection of poems with the pseudonym Slavonier. After his death, the library, together with the Erlangen Manuscript, first became the property of The Learned Society in Altdorf and then came into the possession of the University Library in Erlangen. The reconstruction of the journey of the Erlangen Manuscript leads to the conclusion that the famous manuscript was created in the region of Slavonski Brod sometime between 1708 and 1723.

Keywords

• Erlangen Manuscript
• manuscript collection
• folk poems
• folksinger
• scribe
• the Grenzen
• The Military Frontier