(scholarly abbreviation ''Ass'') is a rounded

Glagolitic The Glagolitic script ( , , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed that it was created in the 9th century for the purpose of translating liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic by Saints Cyril and Methodi ...

Old Church Slavonic Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic ( ) is the first Slavic languages, Slavic literary language and the oldest extant written Slavonic language attested in literary sources. It belongs to the South Slavic languages, South Slavic subgroup of the ...

canon Canon or Canons may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Canon (fiction), the material accepted as officially written by an author or an ascribed author * Literary canon, an accepted body of works considered as high culture ** Western canon, th ...

evangeliary consisting of 158 illuminated

parchment Parchment is a writing material made from specially prepared Tanning (leather), untanned skins of animals—primarily sheep, calves and goats. It has been used as a writing medium in West Asia and Europe for more than two millennia. By AD 400 ...

folios, dated to early 11th century. The manuscript is created in the Ohrid Literary School of the

First Bulgarian Empire The First Bulgarian Empire (; was a medieval state that existed in Southeastern Europe between the 7th and 11th centuries AD. It was founded in 680–681 after part of the Bulgars, led by Asparuh of Bulgaria, Asparuh, moved south to the northe ...

Name and library

The Codex is named after its discoverer, Italian

Maronite Maronites (; ) are a Syriac Christianity, Syriac Christian ethnoreligious group native to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant (particularly Lebanon) whose members belong to the Maronite Church. The largest concentration has traditionally re ...

scholar and Vatican librarian of Lebanese origin Giuseppe Simone Assemani, who discovered it and bought it in Jerusalem in 1736. His nephew Stefano Evodio donated it to the

Vatican Library The Vatican Apostolic Library (, ), more commonly known as the Vatican Library or informally as the Vat, is the library of the Holy See, located in Vatican City, and is the city-state's national library. It was formally established in 1475, alth ...

, where the codex is still kept today.Its precise collocation is Codex Vaticanus Slavicus 3 Glagoliticus.

Composition

By content it is an Aprakos (weekly, service) Gospel. It contains only

pericope In rhetoric, a pericope (; Greek , "a cutting-out") is a set of verses that forms one coherent unit or thought, suitable for public reading from a text, now usually of sacred scripture. Description The term can also be used as a way to identi ...

s (starting with the beginning of the Gospel of John), i.e. lectures prepared for the celebrations in church. At the end of the manuscript there is a Menologium which has lessons to be read during the feasts of the menaion (Sts. Demetrius, Theodosius, Clement and other saints). The codex is held by many to be the most beautiful

book.

History of research and editions

The first person to write about the codex was Mateo Karaman in his work ''Identitá della lingua letterale slava'' (manuscript, Zadar 1746). The manuscript was published by Franjo Rački (Zagreb 1865, Glagolitic), Ivan Črnčić (''Assemanovo izborno evangjelje''; Rome 1878, published privately, transcribed in Latin), Josef Vajs and Josef Kurz (''Evangeliář Assemanův, Kodex vatikánský 3. slovanský, 2. vols'', Prague 1929, ČSAV, phototypical edition) - republished by Josef Kurz in 1966 in Cyrillic transcription. The newest Bulgarian edition is by Vera Ivanova-Mavrodinova and Aksinia Džurova from 1981 (''Asemanievo evangelie''; Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo), with facsimile reproductions.

Linguistic description

The manuscript abounds with ligatures. Linguistic analysis has shown that the manuscript is characterized by frequent vocalizations of yers (''ъ'' > ''o'', ''ь'' > ''e''), occasional loss of epenthesis, and ''ь'' is frequently replaced with hard ''ъ'', esp. after ''r''. These are the traits pointing to the Macedonian area, and are shared with Codex Marianus. Yers are also frequently omitted word-finally, and occasionally non-etymologically mixed (''ь'' being written after ''k'' and ''g'').

References

* *

External links

Manuscript

Editions

Codex Assemanius
scans of the newest 1981 facsimile edition

at the Corpus Cyrillo-Methodianum Helsingiense *

Description

* {{Glagolitic topics Assemanius, Codex 11th-century Christian texts Marianus Medieval Bulgarian literature of Macedonia Bulgarian manuscripts Cyrillo-Methodian studies Ohrid Literary School