Marginalia of the Apostolus Christinopolitanus of the XII Century: Composition, Paleography, and Orthography

Abstract

The research features a manuscript of the Galician-Volynian Apostolus Christinopolitanus dated the XII century (The Lviv Historical Museum of Ukraine, No. 37). This manuscript is one of the earliest surviving copies of the Apostolus. It belongs to the Cyrillo-Methodian translation but contains a number of Preslavic readings. This paper focuses on the extratexts, i.e., inscriptions and in-junctions, in the Apostolus Christinopolitanus and presents a paleographic, orthographic, and phonetic analysis of the marginalia made by the three scribes of the manuscript. The author classified the marginalia made by the first scribe. The classification includes such types of postscripts as comments to facilitate the reading and edits to the main text, glosses, scholia, scribe's comments, etc. The analysis confirms that the extratexts were highly unified and standardized. The analysis of the linguistic features of the first scribe’s handwritten appendices shows the unified orthography of the main text and the marginalia, as well as reflects some features of the Old Russian of that time. The extratexts of the Apostolus Christinopolitanus also demonstrated a variety of pronunciations of Old Russian linguistic use. These texts prove the high degree of development of the book norm and the existence of normalizing aspirations in ancient Russian scriptoria.

Keywords

• marginalia
• old russian language
• manuscripts
• xii century
• slavic apostle
• extra-texts
• paleography
• graphics
• orthography
• phonetics