Bøger om Kirkeslavisk

How and why does vernacular art become foreign? What does ‿Greek manner‿ mean in regions far beyond the Mediterranean? What stories do images need? How do narratives shape pictures? The study addresses these questions in Byzantine paintings from the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, contextualized with evidence from Poland, Serbia, Russia, and Italy. The research follows developments in artistic practices and the reception of these images, as well as distinguishing between the Greek manner ‿ based on visual qualities ‿ and the style favoured by the devout, sustained by cults and altered through stories. Following the reception of Byzantine and pseudo-Byzantine art in Lithuania and Poland from the late fourteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, Maniera Greca in Europe‿s Catholic East argues that tradition is repetitive order achieved through reduction and oblivion, and concludes that the sole persistent understanding of the Greek image has been stereotyped as the icon of the Mother of God.

The palaeography of the first Slavic script - the Glagolitic script - is being published in English language for the first time. Unlike former historiography-based palaeographic textbooks, this study is linguistically substantiated. After presenting the elemental historical and philological knowledge on the creation of the script and its relation to the parallel Slavic script - the Cyrillic - the author goes on to distinguish the development of those linguistically-based segments (e.g. graphemes) from the means that optimize the transfer of linguistic message through the visual writing system. The evolution of letter forms is being observed in the long process of minusculization. The coordination of letters in lines and the readjusting of their forms to the four line system turned out to be the 'spiritus movens' of the changes not only in the letter forms but in the script's entire visual appearance as well. At the focus of interest, there are the oldest Macedonian, Bulgarian, Czech and Croatian Glagolitic texts of the 10th and the 11th century.