By Sam Bowden ’24

Artist unknown. A leaf from a Passion, 18th century, ink on paper, 8 ½ × 6 ¾ in. (21.6 × 17.2 cm), Blick-Harris Study Collection, 2020.456.

This page is a beautiful example of an Eastern Orthodox illuminated manuscript. One side (the recto) is clearly brighter than the other. Despite many archaic grammatical endings and sigla — abbreviated words — the Old Church Slavonic is readable, with time, to anyone with experience with Russian, Ukrainian, or other Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet. Our version shares much in common with older manuscripts like the Kyiv Psalter of 1397 and this pre-modern print of the Postnaya Triod. This isn’t a reflection of the age of this object, but evidence of its authors’ intentions; the burnt orange headings and then-outdated Old Church Slavonic are meant to recall an earlier Slavic manuscript culture. Indeed, print was a well-established industry in the Russian Empire by the 18th century. In 1703, the first print newspaper in the Russian language — Vedomosti, later the title of a modern Russian press — was introduced. This object, then, with its hand-written inscriptions, is deliberately using older forms of transmitting and recording information. Perhaps this was done to lend an air of antiquity to the sacred text contained here, a practice not uncommon in Western Europe at a similar point in print history (see Stallybrass, “Printing and the Manuscript Revolution” and Healy, “Manuscript, Print, and the Lyric in the Seventeenth Century” for an exploration of this phenomenon in this region).

Sam Bowden ’24 is a double major in English and Russian.

Bibliography:

Carpenter, John B. “Answering Eastern Orthodox Apologists Regarding Icons.” Themelios 43, no. 3 (December 2018): pp. 417–33.

Healy, Thomas. “‘Trewly Wrote:’ Manuscript, Print, and the Lyric in the Early Seventeenth Century.” In The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations, ed. Marion Thane, pp. 51–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Stallybrass, Peter. “Printing and the Manuscript Revolution.” In Explorations in Communication and History, ed. Barbie Zelizer, pp. 111–118. London: Routledge, 2008.

Comparative/Associated Objects:

Triod’ Postnaya, 2nd half of the 1550s. British Library, London, EAP556/1/19/1, https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP556-1-19-1

Kyiv Psalter, 1397. Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, Saint Petersburg, ОР ОЛДП F. 6. https://primo.nlr.ru/permalink/f/pq7oh8/07NLR_LMS011433661. See also the Kyiv Psalter on the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, https://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CK%5CY%5CKyivPsalter.htm