Freising manuscripts
The Freising manuscripts are the first Latin-script continuous text in a Slavic language and the oldest document in Slovene.
Description and origin
The manuscripts were found bound into a Latin codex. Four parchment leaves and a further quarter of a page have been preserved. They consist of three texts in the oldest Slovene dialect. Linguistic, stylistic and contextual analyses reveal that these are church texts of careful composition and literary form.The precise date of the origin of the Freising manuscripts cannot be exactly determined; the original text was probably written in the 9th century. In this liturgic and homiletic manuscript, three Slovene records were found and this miscellany was probably an episcopal manual. The Freising manuscripts in it were created between 972 and 1039, most likely before 1000. The main support for this dating is the writing, which was used in the centuries after Charlemagne and is named Carolingian minuscule.
During the time of the writing of the two manuscripts, Bishop Abraham was active in Freising. It is believed that the manuscripts were written in the Möll Valley in Carinthia. For this reason some linguists linked Abraham closely to the origin of the Freising manuscripts and even attributed to him the authorship of one of the texts and suspected that he was of Slovene origin, although this was later disproven.