Catalogue of the Slavonic Cyrillic Manuscripts of the National Szechenyi Library

On the History of our Slavonic Cyrillic Manuscripts

xxv ON THE HISTORY OF OUR SLAVONIC CYRILLIC MANUSCRIPTS Orsolya Karsay Although the collections of the National Széchényi Library have always included books and manuscripts in Slavonic languages, collecting them has never been part of the main focus of the acquisitions policy of the National Library. Therefore the collection is not the outcome of a planned system, but our Slavonic material has rather grown by itself, finding its natural place among Hungarica as a regional Hungaricum within the “Patriotica” materials, i.e. those relating to the historical Kingdom of Hungary. This means it is made up of documents written in languages other than Hungarian resulting from the cultural activities of ethnic groups living within the historical Hungary or in countries adjacent to it. In this sense, the holdings of the Manuscript Collection of the National Széchényi Library, which number over one million items, include manuscripts in various Slavonic languages (i.e. Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, etc.), as well as a group of Rumanian, Greek, Hebrew and other works. As within the Manuscript Collection these are regarded as exotic or minority languages in comparison with the bulky Hungarian, Latin and German units, documents written in them have never received the professional treatment due to them, partly because of a shortage of specialist experts. Their cataloguing has remained super- ficial, and most of them have been hiding in our storerooms almost unknown. The only reference in the manuscript department providing information on them has been a hand-written inventory called Variæ linguæ, also listing manuscripts in the other minority languages. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the Slavonic manuscripts have often been reclassified, with their call numbers changed, which makes the identification of individual items rather difficult even within the inventory. This is one of the reasons why the present undertaking by Professor Cleminson and his colleagues is of such significance. Applying the most up-to-date methods of processing, they are making a detailed content, linguistic, historical, codicological and palæographic examination of our collection of fiftysix manuscripts written in Church Slavonic, which is the most valuable and at the same time least accessible section of our Slavonic holdings. It would be unfair towards old collectors of Hungarian books to suggest that their collections of Church Slavonic manuscripts grew only through accidental acquisitions. This was certainly not the case. They knew that the value of any collection is determined by pieces of international significance. So did the scholarly curators and officials of the Hungarian National Museum, whose donations also xxvi very considerably enriched the numbers of Slavonic codices. Later on, old Slavonic materials were deposited in our Manuscript Collection by several private individuals who were in close contact with Slavonic traditions because of their family or personal connections, political activities, religious denomination or birthplace. There are a few items that have reached us from booksellers or through other channels. In one case, all we know is the year of arrival, and in another even that date is not clear. We have thus outlined five distinct groups through whom Church Slavonic codices came to be among the manuscript collections housed by the National Széchényi Library. The first group is made up of the great nineteenth-century bibliophiles, with Miklós Jankovich the most outstanding among them. The second group includes curators of the museum, and the third is made up of private persons. A fourth group of manuscripts contains items of mixed provenance, and finally in the fifth we have those whose provenance is uncertain. The aim of this paper is to show how the history of these groups is related to the main trends in the history of the National Széchényi Library. The history of each item will be dealt with only insofar as it is relevant to the history of collection. In all the cases where present research is unable to solve the problems of provenance, attention will be drawn to further possibilities of clarifying those issues. Even with this approach, certain questions will have to be left unanswered and their solution left to future research. 1. Old Hungarian book collectors 1.1. Ferenc Széchényi It was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the earliest group of our Church Slavonic manuscripts came into the collections that have for 200 years formed the basis of the Hungarian National Library, called the National Széchényi Library today...