Catalogue of the Slavonic Cyrillic Manuscripts of the National Szechenyi Library

Introduction

ix INTRODUCTION This catalogue contains descriptions of the cyrillic Slavonic manuscripts of the National Széchényi Library in Budapest. Though it describes basically mediæval manuscripts, it does include more recent material insofar as this can be regarded as a continuation of earlier traditions. It restricts itself moreover to codices and fragments of codices, thus excluding charters and other archival documents, and to manuscripts written principally in Slavonic languages: the Library’s collection of Rumanian cyrillic manuscripts is not described. The collection thus defined includes fifty-six manuscripts, the vast majority of which have never been described before and, it is fair to say, have been hitherto unknown to scholarship. They represent nevertheless one of the most important collections of such material in present-day Hungary. The only other collection of comparable size and importance is that of the Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Buda at Szentendre; there are nine such manuscripts in the University Library in Budapest, and a number of other collections which have only one or two examples of them.1 It is by no means unlikely that there are other individual manuscripts in other collections which are yet to be discovered; indeed, some of the items here described came to light only in the course of work on this catalogue. Considering that this group of manuscripts represents only a small fraction of the Library’s holdings, and that they are held outside the main centres of Slavonic studies, it is perhaps not surprising that they have received little scholarly attention . One manuscript, indeed, had been the object of close study even before it entered the Library. This is Fol. Eccl. Slav. 9, which was acquired in 787 by Juraj (György) Ribay, who immediately set about studying its text. He communicated the results of his labours to Josef Dobrovský, who cites the manuscript (“[eine] Handschrift, die Herr Ribay, evangelischer Prediger zu Czinkota in Ungarn, betsitzt ”) as one of his sources for one of the very first attempts at the textual criticism of the Slavonic New Testament (Dobrovský 790). Dobrovský’s article is dated 5. 1 The manuscripts in Szentendre have been thoroughly described in Sindik, Grozdanović-Pajić, ManoZisi 1991, the introduction to which also surveys the previous literature relating to this collection, supplemented by Sindik 2002. The general survey by Tóth 1980 relies largely on previously published material. For the University Library see Cleminson 1995, Stefanović 1998, Velčeva and Musakova 2003. A manuscript in the library of the Academy of Sciences is described by Anguševa and Dimitrova 1995, 1997. Isolated manuscripts outside Budapest are described in Baleczki 1958, Hauptová 1961, Somogyi 1970, Ojtozi 1982, Pandur 1990, Kocsis 1994, 1999, Földvári 1995 and Stefanović 2001. Very brief notices of some of the above are also found in Nyomárkay 1990- . x Sept. 788, which shows how quick Ribay had been to realise the importance of his acquisition and to make it known to scholarship, and he continued to investigate its text as part of his wider Biblical studies.2 In June 794 Dobrovský had the opportunity to examine the manuscript de visu and make a closer study of it (“diligentius codicem hunc examinavi atque integrum contuli”). The results were communicated to J. J. Griesbach (a member of the same circle: Ribay had been his student at Jena in 780-2), and variants from this manuscript are included in the critical apparatus to his edition of the Greek New Testament.3 The first study to mention any of the Library’s Slavonic holdings as such was Ivan Boynychich’s description of the only two mediæval MSS then in the collection, Fol. Eccl. Slav. 7 and 9, which is far superior to the descriptions of the same two manuscripts published in the recent catalogue of the Jankovich exhibition (Boynychich 878, Jankovich catalogue 2002, № 234, 235). After this promising start, however, there were only a brief survey article (Kočubinskij 882) and an even more perfunctory note of the collection’s existence (Conev 927) until László Dezső returned to Fol. Eccl. Slav. 9, which is also the subject of an article by Mária Szarvas, making it the most-studied MS in the collection (Dezső 955, Szarvas 986). Péter Király published articles on two manuscripts, Fragm. Eccl. Slav. 3 and Fol. Eccl. Slav. 3 (Király 968, 974), and Imre Tóth published an article with the same title as Király’s second on Quart. Eccl. Slav. 7 (T...