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Papers and Presentations with Annotations
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This is a corpus containing the Biblical readings found in the Croatian Church Slavonic (Croatian Glagolitic) Missale Plenum for the final two weeks of Lent. They formed the basis of my comparison of the so-called “A” and “B” redactions of the CCS Missale Plenum during my dissertation research, and were also used for a number of subsequent research projects. Text from most manuscripts was excerpted, primarily during 1983-1984, from photographs of the original manuscripts at the Old Church Slavonic Institute (Staroslavenski institut) in Zagreb, and corrected against those facsimiles and in many instances against the original manuscripts. A similar though more limited corpus of comparative data was subsequently drawn from manuscripts of the CCS Breviary, including text of 1 Samuel and the Acts of the Apostles. I plan to publish or post both of these corpora if and when any intellectual property considerations can be successfully addressed, along with further details and discussion of the significance of the corpus.
Description and link pending.
See discussion under Linguistic Papers and Presentations.
See discussion under Linguistic Papers and Presentations.
See discussion under Linguistic Papers and Presentations.
I am posting my notes—re-formatted in a modern font and cleaned up—for this presentation from the early days of personal computing about electronic excerpting and publishing of medieval manuscript text. While dated in a number of details that today may seem humorously quaint, the two substantive issues remain relevant. I have left intact the references to publishing on diskettes, which also recall the practice of including diskettes in pockets inside the covers of books, for their nostalgia value.
The main points of the presentation concern the benefits to future research that could result from fully exploiting the potential of computerized excerpting and publication. The two main conclusions can be summarized as follows. The first is the value of encoding into our transcriptions various types of information (especially of an orthographic nature) that have analytical value, but in the past have often been excluded from published transcriptions of manuscript text. The second (which could no doubt have been summarized with less expenditure of electronic ink) concerns the value of what I term “comparative corpora.” If a researcher is going to go to the trouble of excerpting in extenso parallel text from multiple witnesses to be compared during textual analysis, why not (question posed rhetorically) make that comparative corpus available to other researchers so that they can review textual variation among the witnesses within its native (text-internal) context, and can perform their own analyses on that same corpus? While in no way reducing the value of critical editions, comparative corpora provide an additional resource beyond the potential of critical editions in presenting cross-sectional data (data on textual variation among witnesses), which present such data selectively and in an atomized form.
In addition to the discussion of excerpting and publishing manuscript text, a number of research results are interspersed within the presentation. Among these, I presented a new explanation of the enigmatic form bisi of the 3 Sg. Aorist of the verb biti “to be,” showing it to be an artefact of a form of abbreviation known as compression that must have been utilized in early CCS, though it is not a normal feature of mature CCS texts.
Reviewed by C. M. MacRobert in Modern Language Review 88, 1993, 1046-1047, M. Mladenova in Sŭpostavitelno ezikoznanie 18, 1993, 57-59, and J. Reinhart in Wiener slavistisches Jahrbuch 39, 1993, 225-234). For further information, including a link to the full volume (reformatted), see the discussion under Linguistic Papers and Presentations.
See discussion under Linguistic Papers and Presentations.
See discussion under Linguistic Papers and Presentations.
“Variation and Norm in Croatian Church Slavonic,” Slovo 41-43, 1993 (1994), 155-196. Also available from the site: https://hrcak.srce.hr/14876. At the “hrcak” site choose the link “Puni tekst: engleski, pdf (48 MB)” and download.
Abstract:
On the basis of A. Issatschenko’s definition of “literary language” and P. Rehder’s recent explication of that definition with the reference to medieval Croatia, the author concludes that Croatian Chruch Slavonic (CCS), neither by itself nor as part of a functional unity including also the čakavian dialect, texts composed in that dialect, and mixed čakavian-CCS text, could be characterized as a literary language. Medieval Croatian literacy was based on the coexistence of two independent sociolinguistic systems. One was the “Latinic complex”, based on Latin-Čakavian bilingualism. Its most visible characteristics were the Latinic script and Latin liturgy. The second was the “Glagolitic complex”, based on CCS-čakavian diglossia. The most visible features of this complex were the Glagolitic script and Slavonic liturgy. Croatian diglossia was probably of the type which the High and Low variants represent not only a functional, but also a linguistic unity. In the absence of explicit codification (grammatical-orthographical manuals and/or polemics concerning the linguistic norm), the norm was established and maintained through the example of the most authoritative texts. In such a situation, one genre (or group of genres) had to be set apart as an exemplary genre, in which infiltration of non-normative elements was not allowed. Stylistically motivated deviation from the norm in other genres would be conditioned by the establishment and documentation of the norm in the exemplary genre. The author suggests as a working hypothesis that the exemplary genre of CCS consisted of the biblical lections (i. e. lectionary) of the missal.
Further discussion will be included subsequently under Linguistic Papers and Presentations.
See discussion under Linguistic Papers and Presentations.
See discussion with a link to the article under Linguistic Papers and Presentations.
The abstract and link to the published version are available below.
This paper compares the significance of two codices of the Croatian Glagolitic Missale Plenum, the New York Missal and the Hrvoje Missal, highlighting the “ordinariness” of the New York Missal in contrast to the uniqueness (especially linguistic) of the Hrvoje Missal and the especial value of the New York Missal precisely on account of its ordinariness. It also provides some additional detail concerning the origin and significance of the New York Missal in addition to that provided in my 1986 dissertation and revised 1991 published version. In particular, it goes beyond the identification of the “main” scribe of the New York Missal with the main scribe of the First Oxford Missal to suggest a revised date for the completion of the New York Missal, probably early in the second half of the 15th century, based on J. Reinhart’s dating of the First Oxford Missal to the year 1463. The earliest estimates had placed the completion of the codex near the beginning of the 15th century, while my own earlier research had suggested a date most likely in the second quarter of the 15th century.
See Linguistic Papers and Presentations for link.
See discussion under Linguistic Papers and Presentations.
See discussion under Linguistic Papers and Presentations.
Description and link pending.
Abstract: The liturgy of the papal Curia, most likely in a Franciscan redaction, was probably known in Croatia as early as the first half of the thirteenth century, and a Slavonic version of the new liturgical books probably existed by the middle of the century. However, a number of facts speak in favor of a secondary reform or revision of the Croatian Glagolitic liturgical books during the second half of the 13th century. A central role in suggesting and justifying this thesis belongs to the so-called Kukuljević Missal Fragment. The language and text of this single leaf already represent the Curia missal, but differ in significant respects from what is found in all complete codices of the Missale plenum from the 14th and 15th centuries.
See discussion under Linguistic Papers and Presentations.
This is a shorter oral version of “Early Textual Transmission from Bulgaria to Northern Dalmatia: A Source for Reconstructing the Pre-Hilandar Serbian “Library”” (see below). Further description and a link will be posted subsequently.
This was the initial oral presentation on this topic. See below for links to a later oral presentation in Croatian (Tragove židovskog utjecaja…) and to the published version . A link to this presentation will be posted when and if feasible.
Abstract*
* Drugi hrvatski slavistički kiongress. Knjiga sažetaka. Dubravka Sesar and Ivana Vidović, ed. Zagreb, 1999, p. 31.
U referatu ću predložiti i razmotriti hipotezu:
- da sačuvani hrvatskoglagoljski brevijari 13.-15. stoljeća predstavljaju dvije osnovne redakcije, koje nazivam “A” i “B”;
- da je redakcija A starija (nastala do sredine 13. stoljeća), a redakcija B mlađa (nastala na osnovu redakcije A vjerojatno u početku 14. stoljeća);
- da se razdvajanje dviju redakcija brevijara ostvarilo istovremeno sa račvanjem dviju redakcija hrvatskoglagoljskih misala kao dio jedne opće revizije hrvatskoglagoljskih liturgijskih knjiga.
In this report the following hypothesis is proposed and examined:
- that the preserved Croatian Glagolitic breviaries of the 13th-15th centuries represent two basic redactions, labeled “A” and “B”;
- that redaction A is older (originating by the middle of the 13th century), and redaction B younger (originating probably at the beginning of the 14th century);
- that the bifurcation of the two redactions of the breviary occurred at the same time as that of the two analogous redactions of the Croatian Glagolitic missal as part of a single general revision of the Croatian Glagolitic liturgical books.
This entry is included for historical purposes, as an early expression of what has since become a predominant hypothesis–that the divergence of two groups of Croatian Glagolitic liturgical texts (northern, or A vs. southern, or B) resulted from a discrete redactional event sometime around the turn of the 14th century. (See the contribution by Šimić and Vela in Slovo, vol. 71, 2021, 121-168, for an overview of the remarkable progress that has taken place in study of redactional relations among the Croatian Glagolitic books in recent years.) Due to my acceptance of a position with the United Nations just prior to the Congress, I was compelled to cancel my participation. I returned to this topic in my presentation at the 2009 AATSEEL convention, in which I presented and supported the same hypothesis, and am currently working on analyses of lections from 1 Samuel and Acts of the Apostles in the CCS breviaries (for eventual publication) in which I re-examine this hypothesis in greater depth. For further details and historical commentary see the entry below for “Comparative Stemmatology of the Croatian Glagolitic Breviaries and Missals.”
This is an oral Croatian version of “Jonah 3, 3:…,” below. Link to the paper.
Description pending.
A direct link to the paper is provided under section 3.a. of the JSTOR terms of service and with the permission of the publisher.
JSTOR and EBSCOHOST links:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3086234
http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=f741408c-e42a-473b-899e-69c737c7a179%40pdc-v-sessmgr06
http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=4&sid=f741408c-e42a-473b-899e-69c737c7a179%40pdc-v-sessmgr06&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=505022616&db=asu
This project was in its initial, aspirational, planning stages at the time, prior to the coordination of permissions, funding, and publishing. Topics of discussion included the need for such an edition of this earliest extant manuscript codex of the CCS breviary (which remains an important lacuna in the research tools available for Croatian Glagolitic textual studies), preparation of readable facsimiles from microfilms in our possession (which we had already begun), and principles for transcription and presentation, based on previous study of both CCS breviaries and missals (see also “On Publishing Croatian Church Slavonic Manuscripts,” above). Unfortunately, the operational tempo of my activities for the United Nations at that time made it impossible to bring the project beyond this stage, a situation that only intensified during my engagement at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center.
A more detailed description will be posted subsequently, hopefully together with news of the renewed possibility that such an edition may become a reality.
The Hebrew text in the attached scanned version, particularly the pointing, is only partially legible. If possible, I will attach the submitted version in Microsoft Word. Please check back.
Abstract (http://aatseel.org/100111/pdf/program/2008/28C-6_2_Corin_Andrew.pdf):
Title: Relevance of the Hebrew Original to the Assessment of Slavonic Translations of Isaiah
Author: Andrew R. Corin, Defense Language Institute
Ancient and medieval translations from the Hebrew Bible represent one pre-modern field of “constrained translation” (translation requiring non-literal techniques characteristic of literary translation, yet constrained by a need for accountability and recoverability of original content imposed by the needs of the client or public for whom the translation is carried out). Translated versions were subject to critical scrutiny by users for whom multiple levels of meaning were of the utmost import, and even the modern scholarly literature is replete with claims that one or another early translation more or less “faithfully” renders the content of the original (Torrey 1944: 1 being an oft-cited example in regard to the Septuagint translations). I have examined two Slavonic redactions of an excerpt from Isaiah, based on all manuscripts of the Croatian Church Slavonic Missal (as inventoried in Corin 1991), and compared the Slavonic text to the Septuagint, Vulgate and Hebrew, utilizing the most authoritative critical editions. Based on this analysis, I argue that in order to assess the faithfulness of the Slavonic translation, one must go beyond its immediate Greek and Latin textual antecedents and encompass also the Hebrew text and its interpretive framework. Through such a process, the Slavonic versions come to provide evidence of semantic drift over the course of successive translations, through unconscious “telephone game” effect, conscious interpretive translation techniques, and vacillation in the underlying Hebrew text. Evidence emerges of contact between the Slavonic translators/editors and one or another version of the Hebrew text, as does the relevance of the functional role of the Hebrew text in the milieu in which it originated.
Works Cited
Corin, Andrew R. (1991) The New York Missal: A paleographic and phonetic analysis. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica.
Torrey, Charles C. (1944) “The Older Book of Esther,” Harvard Theological Review 37(1): 1–40.
I am posting here the abstract from the 2009 AATSEEL Conference Program. When and if possible, I will post the text of the presentation and illustrative materials.
ABSTRACT (https://www.aatseel.org/100111/pdf/abstracts/abstract_2009_7_1.pdf):
Title: Comparative Stemmatology of the Croatian Glagolitic Breviaries and Missals
Author: Andrew R. Corin, Defense Language Institute
The following hypothesis is proposed and examined on the basis of Old-Testament (1 Samuel) and New-Testament (Acts) readings: 1) Croatian Church Slavonic (CCS) breviaries (13th-15th centuries) appear in two versions reflecting two discrete redactions — “A” (older, by mid-13th century) and “B” (younger by possibly half a century); 2) the divergence of these versions occurred simultaneously to the divergence of analogous “A” and “B” versions of the CCS missal, within a single general revision of CCS liturgical books.
Early Slavonic literacy developed along two divergent tracks which might, albeit anachronistically, be termed Orthodox Slavonic and Catholic Slavonic (primarily CCS). Slavonic literacy was imported into Croatia in part directly from Moravia or Pannonia, in part also from Macedonia. CCS evidence thus represents one of two obligatory elements of attempts to reconstruct the inventory and form of the original Cyrillo-Methodian textual corpus. However, utilization of CCS evidence without adequate understanding of its stemmatology can lead to erroneous conclusions.
By the mid-13th century, the CCS biblical/liturgical texts had been gathered into two primary liturgical books, the breviary and missal. Successive stages of research have revealed that: a) in the breviaries, many biblical texts exist in two translations, one “from-the-Greek” and the other “from-the-Latin”; b) many “from-the-Latin” translations are in fact translations from the Greek subsequently revised against the Vulgate; c) individual breviaries contain either primarily “from-the-Greek” or primarily “from-the-Latin” translations; d) among the missals, one can similarly distinguish two groups of manuscripts — group “A” (generally more archaic, containing primarily “from-the-Greek” translations), and group “B” (more innovative, containing primarily “from-the-Latin” translations); e) the differences between groups “A” and “B” of the missal originated as a discrete division resulting from redaction. It remains to be explored whether, and to what extent, this redactional division is parallel and related to that observable among the breviaries.
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[Historical note: This presentation represents a belated oral version of what was supposed to have been my presentation at the Second Croatian Slavistic Congress (Drugi hrvatski slavistički kongres, Osijek, 1999; see the entry above).
Work carried out during the 1980s established the redactional basis of variation previously noted by Marija Pantelić among lections of the CCS missale plenum between two groups of manuscripts–one more northerly and retaining a greater reliance upon original translations from the Greek, the other more southerly and showing greater adaptation toward the Vulgate. This redactional hypothesis articulated that the observed variation arose as the result of a discrete redactional event, as opposed to variation arising solely by gradual accretion over the course of textual transmission through the on-going action of any number of typical processes that introduce alteration within any manuscript tradition (see “A Comparative Corpus…,” “The New York Missal, a Paleographic and Phonetic Analysis,” “Variation and Norm in Croatian Church Slavonic,” “O reformama hrvatskoglagoljskih liturgijskih knjiga,” oral and written versions, and “Značenje Newyorškog misala kao spomenika hrvatskoglagoljske pismenosti,” above). Based on this conclusion, it seemed likely that similar variation observable in Biblical lections of the CCS breviaries, which since Vajs’s publications near the turn of the 20th century had been described as reflecting translations “from the Greek” and “from the Latin,” could be shown to also derive from an analogous redactional event through similar methodology.
Toward that end, I attempted to test this hypothesis against a comparative corpus of Biblical texts drawn from lections of as many as possible of the CCS breviaries, parallel to the procedure I had carried out with the CCS missals. During the late spring and summer of 1991, with the support of an academic-year Fulbright faculty scholarship, I initiated collection of such a comparative corpus from as many as possible of the known breviaries, working initially from the collection of facsimiles (photographic reproductions) of CCS manuscript codices at the Staroslavenski institut in Zagreb.
The task proved more difficult than had been the case for missal lections, due to the greater variety of content and length of readings preserved in the breviaries, as well as the greater number of breviary manuscripts. It proved especially difficult to collect a corpus sufficient to support general conclusions in the unique conditions of that summer. After little more than a month, during which the site of my activities alternated primarily between the library of the Staroslavenski institut, a guest apartment beneath the institute, and a shelter located further beneath the building, I was finally compelled by U.S. Embassy staff to evacuate from Zagreb overland to Austria and then home. During the time available to me I ultimately settled upon lections from 1 Samuel and the Acts of the Apostles as representatives of the Old and New Testament, respectively, smaller than the corpus I had originally envisioned. The choice of these books, moreover—especially in the case of 1 Samuel—was based more on practical circumstances than the a priori attractiveness of their texts for the analysis of redactional development and filiations among the CCS breviaries, or between the breviary versions and other Slavonic textual traditions. During subsequent brief research visits to the Staroslavenski institut and locations of some original codices, which remained complicated until near the end of 1995, I was able to add text from several additional manuscripts and to correct a number of transcripts against the original codices, especially when faced with particularly difficult-to-transcribe locations.
I was scheduled to finally present initial results at the Second Croatian Slavistic Congress (Drugi hrvatski slavistički kongres, Osijek, 1999). Just prior to the Congress, however, I accepted what was at the time expected to be a temporary position with the United Nations, and was forced to cancel my participation. That position soon became semi-permanent, and the intensity of my work for the U.N. severely limited my ability to pursue academic research and publication.
In January 2008, following a brief stint as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., I took up my new position as an associate professor, later professor, at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, with high hopes that I could at last resume intensive original research in the field of Croatian Glagolitic studies. That was not to be. After initially serving as an instructor in the Serbian and Croatian and Russian programs, I moved into a series of managerial positions (academic associate dean, two dean’s positions, and finally an associate provost post), in which the intense operational tempo, together with other factors, once again severely curtailed the possibilities for original research and conference participation. It is only recently, in emeritus status, that the possibility for more intensive original research and publication activity has once again opened up, though now with an extensive backlog of projects that will take years to work through. Among those backlogged projects are publishable research products based on my now thirty-year-old corpus of textual data from 1 Samuel and the Acts of the Apostles, following up on this oral presentation.]
Chapter abstract from the project site (http://www.english.upenn.edu/~dwallace/europe/index.html; Part IX, Chapter 73):
Zadar, Italian Zara, Roman Iadera, occupies a peninsula on the mid-Adriatic Croatian coast. Despite her distinguished history as the political capital of Byzantine Dalmatia, Zadar’s peripheral geo-political position has also rendered her vulnerable, and for centuries she has struggled for self-determination against Venetian pressure. Though Zadar in the 1348-1418 period is not yet a centre of humanistic literary experimentation, she is nevertheless the source and setting of a major work of historiographic action literature that retains its power to grip readers to the present day. The town also lies at the centre of a remarkable Church Slavonic and vernacular regional literacy written in arcane Glagolitic script.
To allow readers to experience the drama of the former, and sense the texture of the latter, which is far removed from the norms of either Western or Eastern Europe, my contribution is organized into two sections, each based on a flashback to a crucial event in the distant past that provides a necessary perspective to the Regeneration-era present.
The first flash-back transports the reader to the 7th-century Slavic invasion of Dalmatia, out of which Zadar’s unique Croatian-Roman synthesis arose. We briefly lay out Zadar’s subsequent history of struggle against Venetian domination, which provides the backdrop and context for the chronicle of The Siege of Zadar. The second flashback takes us to Greater Moravia and the Cyrillo-Methodian mission. It then moves back toward the post-1348 period, outlining the unlikely and partially obscure development of Croatian Glagolitic literacy, which is approaching its golden age in Regeneration-era Zadar. Zadar, during our period, finds itself simultaneously an urban hub both of Dalmatian Latinate culture and of the regional Church-Slavonic and vernacular Glagolitic literacy, the only area in Catholic Europe in which a non-Latin liturgy was at that time tolerated and actively practiced.
This article, framed in part as an autobiographical narrative, explores the power of minute textual analysis. Linguistic or textual archaeology, as we may characterize it, has the potential to penetrate the human origins of seemingly impersonal medieval Croatian Church Slavonic (Glagolitic) liturgical and biblical texts, and of the manuscript codices that contain them. Detailed analysis, and close inferential reasoning based on such analysis, occasionally allow us to go beyond recovering details and broader connections in the language, chronology and textual affiliations within the manuscript traditions, to elucidate aspects of the lives of the people who created them. The paper goes on to demonstrate that in order to properly understand the textual development of Croatian Glagolitic translations from the Hebrew Bible, one most occasionally have recourse back to the Hebrew “original,” even though the Church Slavonic texts had been directly translated from Greek and/or Latin versions. Finally, it is noted in closing that the power of minute textual analysis is not limited to medieval and ancient texts, but has application also in the modern world, including in the forensic analysis of texts believed to have been utilized by persons in positions of leadership to incite hatred and violence.
Link to the article. A link to the full issue will be added when it is posted by the publisher.
This is a translated and moderately updated version of “The New York Missal and an American Slavist’s Odyssey,” which appeared in Bašćina, vol. 21. See the description above.