Codex Assemanius


Codex Assemanius is a rounded Glagolitic Old Church Slavonic canon evangeliary consisting of 158 illuminated parchment folios, dated to early 11th century. The manuscript is created in the Ohrid Literary School of the First Bulgarian Empire.

Name and library

The Codex is named after its discoverer, Italian Maronite scholar and Vatican librarian of Lebanese origin Giuseppe Simone Assemani, who discovered it and bought it in Jerusalem in 1736. His nephew Stefano Evodio donated it to the Vatican Library, where the codex is still kept today.

Composition

By content it is an Aprakos Gospel. It contains only pericopes, i.e. lectures prepared for the celebrations in church. At the end of the manuscript there is a Menologium which has lessons to be read during the feasts of the menaion. The codex is held by many to be the most beautiful Old Church Slavonic book.

History of research and editions

The first person to write about the codex was Mateo Karaman in his work Identitá della lingua letterale slava. The manuscript was published by Franjo Rački at the urging of Pavel Jozef Šafárik in Zagreb in 1865, Ivan Črnčić, Josef Vajs and Josef Kurz - republished by Josef Kurz in 1966 in Cyrillic transcription. The newest Bulgarian edition is by Vera Ivanova-Mavrodinova and Aksinia Džurova from 1981, with facsimile reproductions.

Linguistic description

The manuscript abounds with ligatures. Linguistic analysis has shown that the manuscript is characterized by frequent vocalizations of yers, occasional loss of epenthesis, and ь is frequently replaced with hard ъ, esp. after r. These are the traits pointing to the Macedonian area, and are shared with Codex Marianus. Yers are also frequently omitted word-finally, and occasionally non-etymologically mixed.

Editions