Читать книгу Memory of the World: The treasures that record our history from 1700 BC to the present day - UNESCO - Страница 38

Archangel Gospel of 1092

Inscribed 1997

What is it

A Cyrillic manuscript on calfskin parchment written in 1092 of the four Gospels of the New Testament and lectionary in codex or bound-book form.

Why was it inscribed

The Archangel Gospel presents valuable evidence of the state and development of religion, philosophy and culture in Europe and in European Russia at the end of the 11th century.

Where is it

Russian State Library, Moscow, Russia

The existence of the Archangel Gospel was unknown to the world until 1876 when it arrived in Moscow and was there sold by its owner, a farmer from the Archangel or Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia. Beyond these facts, little is known of its origins and provenance although it has been suggested that the book was a product of St George’s (Yuriev) Monastery at Novgorod to the south of Archangel.

The manuscript itself contains the four books of the Gospel together with a lectionary – a collected listing of the specific readings appointed for worship on a particular day. The colophon or publishing detail of the manuscript records that two scribes wrote the main parts, although there are shorter, inserted contributions from two other scribes. The Gospel’s design is relatively simple and its illustration minimal compared with better known and more highly illustrated and illuminated medieval manuscripts. The relative plainness of the book’s appearance perhaps suggests that the copy was intended for everyday use rather than for presentation as a gift to a patron.

Rare and attractive as the Gospel is, its particular value lies in what it reveals about the time and culture from which it came. In 1054 the Great Schism divided the Christian Church along differing theological lines into Eastern Greek and Western Latin wings and the Archangel Gospel is a product of the aftermath of the split.

The Gospel is written in Cyrillic rather than Latin, and as such it is one of the oldest existing Eastern Slavic books in the world. The Cyrillic alphabet was a form that had developed in Russia as recently as the 10th century, so the transcription of the Slavonic language of the Church into Cyrillic makes the book highly valuable for scholars of linguistics. In addition, the handwriting in the manuscript is invaluable to paleographers.

The Gospel is also significant in that it is a codex and is bound in the form of printed books of today. The practice of presenting information in book rather than in scroll form is generally thought to derive from the spread of Christianity, which early adopted the codex form for the Bible. Scrolls continued to be used in Far Eastern culture beyond the end of their use in the West.