Disputationen kommer att vara på ryska

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Abstract

This dissertation carries out a codicological and palaeographic investigation of Slavic parchment fragments taken from Russia to Sweden as war booty during a period of Swedish-Russian cultural interactions and military conflicts in the late 16th – early 17th centuries. The fragments in question were kept in Sweden until the beginning of the 19th century and mostly used as accounting binders. After 1809, some accounting records of Finnish territories (along with their parchment covers) were transferred from Sweden to Finland. Among them were accounting records with Slavic covers. In Finland, the parchment covers were removed from the accounting books and administrative documents that they had enclosed and sent to the University Library in Helsinki (now the National Library of Finland). In 1869, the Slavic fragments stored in Finland were donated to the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and then preserved in the Academy’s library (BAN, collection “Finliandskie otryvki”). Two Slavic fragments later came to England with George Stephens’ collection. Thus, the Slavic fragments are now held in archives, libraries and museums in four countries (Sweden, England, Finland and Russia). I use the designation The Swedish Collection of Slavic Parchment Fragments to refer to these four collections, once preserved in Sweden as part of a larger Swedish collection (the largest collection of medieval parchment fragments in Europe).

All the parchment fragments belonging to the Swedish collection are undated, i.e. they have no inscriptions or additional information about the scribe, owner or patron, which would make it possible to immediately establish the time and place of their creation. This circumstance determined my choice of method for the analysis of the preserved fragments. They are studied in a comprehensive manner that combines codicological, palaeographic, historical and linguistic analysis. This has made it possible to pursue the study of the fragments in different directions, and to obtain the new specific and more general results presented in this dissertation.

The palaeographic method of identifying scribes on the basis of their handwriting enabled me to connect different fragments with each other as well as with comparative manuscripts, and to determine their origins in the Mediaeval scriptoria of ancient Rus′: they were produced not only in Novgorod, but also in Pskov, Rostov and Moscow.

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