This pioneering work introduces and presents the first full publication of the text of an unusual fourteenth-century Bulgarian gospel manuscript known as the Curzon Gospel. Volume I is an annotated transcription edition of the manuscript. Volume II is a comprehensive introduction and commentary volume analyzing its linguistic, orthographic, and textual features.
The Curzon Gospel c. 1354, is important both for the study of the development of the Bulgarian language and for understanding the medieval Slavic tradition of Gospel transmission. Unlike most medieval Slavic manuscripts, it is reliably datable and serves as a chronological reference point for other gospel manuscripts. Professor Vakareliyska's annotated transcription edition includes modern chapter and verse numeration and a line-by-line comparison of the text with a corpus of twelve other Church Slavonic manuscripts. It has an index verborum of all orthographic and morphological forms in the text and their locations. Professor Vakareliyska has written and designed her commentary volume for a general audience of linguists, medievalists, Byzantinists, and Church historians. She examines the Curzon Gospel's close relationship to the thirteenth and fourteenth-century Dobreisho and Banitsa gospels and, by comparing the three manuscripts, offers a broad reconstruction of their common ancestor. She includes a detailed discussion of the Curzon Gospel's calendar of saints, discussing its relation to the tenth-century Constantinople Typikon and Latin martyrologies, and its implications for the understanding of the medieval Slavic calendar tradition. The book is fully indexed.
These volumes offer a unique resource for the study of the medieval Church Slavonic language and Gospel tradition, and the veneration of saints in the Slavic Eastern Orthodox tradition. Cynthia Vakareliyska's work will be treasured by generations of scholars.
