On the History of Old Believer in Lithuania in 19th Century: Rimkai Old Believer Church Assembly in 1856 and its Resolutions

The history of Old Believers in Lithuania in the 19th century is insufficiently studied. Well, we know the main centers, events and names of the most important figures, the key moments in the history of the Old Believer society are identified. But there are any generalizing monographs in this field and now the main task is to accumulate empirical material and try to put them in a future common historical narrative. The Old Believer community of Rimkai is one of the oldest in the central part of present-day Lithuania. In 1856 an Old Believers’ church assembly was held in the village of Rimkai. This assembly has so far been unknown in historiography, so this is the first time information about the meeting is being introduced into scientific circulation. The resolutions of the assembly are preserved in the only manuscript, which i s now held at the Russian State Library as part of E. V. Barsov’s collection no. 1025. The resolutions consist of 33 articles discussing the Old Believers’ iconolatry as well as regulation of ritual and everyday norms of behaviour applicable to both church leaders and ordinary parishioners. The documents were signed by 13 Old Believers’ spiritual fathers and monks from Lithuania and East Prussia. This study contains a diplomatic edition of Rimkai resolutions too. The text of the document is supplemented by historical commentary and source analysis.

2.-ledstryk og andre sprogformer i Kortvending

A new and brilliant diplomatic edition of »Kortt wendingh« appeared in 2013, following MS AM 808, 4°. The editor was †Leif Stedstrup. The edition contains a so-called »school comedy« written by Hans Christensen Sthen in c. 1570. Sthen was born in 1544 and grew up in Roskilde. His hymns, some of which are still sung, are well known, but his language is not particularly well researched. I have tried to extract all of the interesting pronunciations and a few of the grammatical features that occur in »Kortt wendingh«. It has not proven to be an easy task because Danish orthography in the sixteenth century was somewhat complex and can be difficult for us to evaluate today. But as all alphabetical writing encapsulates the pronunciation of its time, I think that such a linguistic investigation can be undertaken and provide information about late sixteenth-century Danish pronunciation on Sjælland. (Incidentally, »Kortt wendingh« is both the name of the main character (cf. the English name Curt) and a phrase in Danish meaning a ‘sharp vicissitude’ (concerning one’s fate), which is, indeed, the topic of the play).

The plays with the axe in armour of the Anonimo Bolognese (1510-1515)

This contribution examines an anonymous text (Di Accia armato di tutt’arme ) addressing the handling of the axe for armoured combat, compiled in a two-volume anonymous manuscript collection of the beginning of the 16th c. This collection is of particular interest since it predates the “classical” authors of the Bolognese school of the 16th c. and marks a turning point from an earlier late Medieval tradition. Moreover the inclusion of a text dedicated to armour fighting is equally interesting since this kind of combat tends to fade away from the technical register of the next Bolognese authors. The manuscript is shortly described and the text is presented in a diplomatic edition, with a translation and a reproduction of the manuscript in appendices. The content is described and analysed from a technical and a historical point of view, allowing comparison with other similar treatises, identification of the arms and armour, and discussion of the context of application.

Kajian Naskah Kitab Qawa’id al-‘Aqaid Wa Huwa Tsaaniy Min Kitab Ihya Ulumuddin Milik Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II

The development of Palembang as a Malay Islamic civilized city that advanced in the early 19th century AD, one of which is drawn from the attention of the Sultan of Palembang to religious texts In this paper examines the description of the manuscript of the Kitab of Qowaidil Aqoid Ma Huwa Tsaniy min Kitab Ihya Ulumuddin owned by Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II. The method of philology research uses a single edition model, using the workings of the diplomatic edition. This manuscript's writing in Arabic is included in Ilmu Kalam, which needs a particular explanation from Ulama Ilmu Kalam. The illumination of the manuscript appears simple, using European paper. From colophon, we can see the amount of attention and appreciation of Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II to Palembang Sultanate collection's religious manuscripts.

Anecdotes of several archbishops of Canterbury: A lost bifolium from Reynistaðarbók – Discovered in The British Library

In 1787, Grímur Thorkelin, the secretary of the Arnamagnæan Commission, gave the manuscript collector Thomas Astle two paper manuscripts and a parchment bifolium. After Astle’s death, these manuscripts found their way into the Stowe collection and are now kept in the British Library. The paper manuscripts contain transcriptions of texts found in a manuscript in the Arnamagnæan collection and were probably written by Thorkelin himself. The bifolium was, however, written in the fourteenth century. It contains a compilation of short stories about English bishops, mostly archbishops of Canterbury, preceded by a short prologue. For the compilation, the compiler has gathered and adapted material from sources that were already available in Old Norse-Icelandic translations, including Árni Lárentíusson’s Dunstanus saga. However, not all the texts in the compilation are known to exist elsewhere in Icelandic translation. An examination shows that the bifolium was written by the same scribe who wrote parts of Reynistaðarbók in AM 764 4to, and a closer look reveals that the bifolium was once a part of that same manuscript. The last narrative on the bifolium tells the life of St Cuthbert, but its conclusion is now at the top of f. 36r in AM 764 4to. Furthermore, catalogues of the Arnamagnæan collection compiled in the first third of the seventeenth century show that tales about archbishops of Canterbury were included in AM 764 4to, but they are now missing. It thus appears that Thorkelin, who had easy access to Arnamagnæan manuscripts, removed the bifolium before journeying to England, causing its text to fall into oblivion for over two centuries. In the article, the history of the bifolium is discussed, and the script and orthography of its scribe examined and compared to that of scribe E in AM 764 4to. The sources of the compilation’s texts are traced, and the compiler’s methods are analysed. Finally, a diplomatic edition of the texts of the compilation that is now split between the Stowe bifolium and AM 764 4to is presented.

Frumtignarvísur: Óþekkt ljóðabréf eftir séra Einar Sigurðsson í Eydölum

A poem with the title “Frumtignarvísur” (A poem to the Firstborn) is to be found in the manuscript Lbs 847 4to, which was in all likelyhood collected by Magnús Jónsson in Vigur in the year 1693. Two shorter poems, titled “Nú koma aðrar” (Here is another poem) and “En þessar eiga með að fylgja” (But these are supposed to accompany them), follow “Frumtignarvísur”. The manuscript contains religious poetry by various poets, some identified and some unknown, and some secular poetry as well. The author of the three poems under discussion is unidentified in the manuscript. Here I argue that the poems belong to the genre of verse letters/epistolary poems and, furthermore, that they were composed by the Reverend Einar Sigurðsson in Eydalir for his son the Reverend Gísli Einarsson in Vatnsfjörður by Ísafjarðardjúp in the Westfjords. I suggest that the purpose of “Frumtignarvísur” was to respond to the son’s complaints and to moralise over him, but also to encourage him and give him paternal blessing. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the third verse letter is of a similar kind to Frumtignarvísur, but the second poem is of a more affirmative nature, possibly from the time when the son started his career in the Westfjords. Finally, the first critical edition of the poems is presented at the end of the article, both in a diplomatic edition and in modern orthography

Algorismus in GKS 1812 4to: Transcription and translation

This article provides a diplomatic edition of the Algorismus, an Old Norse translation of the Carmen de Algorismo of Alexander of Villedieu (c. 1170–c. 1240), found in the encyclopedic manuscript GKS 1812 4to 13v1–16v31. This version has not been published previously. It has various characteristics, most notably in the script as well as in some readings, which distinguish it from previous editions that were based on AM 544 4to, a part of Hauksbók. Also, included here is, as far as is known, the first English translation of the Algorismus.

Multilingualism in Greater Poland court records (1386–1448): tagging discourse boundaries and code-switching

This paper introduces the Electronic Repository of Greater Poland Oaths, eROThA (1386–1446), a digitisation project of a diplomatic edition of mediaeval land court oaths recorded in Latin and Old Polish, resulting in a small, lightly tagged specialised bilingual corpus. We present the background, aims, design and methodology of the project. We also discuss the problems and limitations entrenched in turning a printed diplomatic edition into a machine-readable diplomatic edition equipped with a new interpretative layer that is sensitive to the switches between Latin and Old Polish. In addition to the automatic annotation of code-switched items on the basis of typographic characteristics of the printed edition, flexible coding of recurrent language and discourse boundary phenomena has been introduced manually to account for linguistically ambiguous or neutral forms. The project offers a fully multilingual corpus, as well as customised Polish-only and Latin-only datasets, and enables filtered metadata searches in the online front-end. Overall, the report presents a methodology for constructing multilingual corpora in the context of legal cultures in medieval Central Europe that may be extrapolated to datasets originating in other periods and regions.

King Arthur’s Charter: A Thirteenth-Century French Satire Against Bretons

On the verso of the last leaf of a twelfth-century manuscript containing the poetry of Hilarius, a student of Abelard, appears a faux charter purporting to have been issued by Arthur, king of the Britons, in the hundredth year of his immortality. In the act, Arthur thanks the descendants of his British subjects for their fidelity and grants them an exclusive franchise to fish in secret rivulets. The privilege contains two prohibitions: one prohibiting Britons from wearing shoes and the other prohibiting them from owning cats. This article provides a diplomatic edition, English translation and analysis of King Arthur’s Charter. It identifies the strange stipulations of the charter as tropes of anti-Breton satire, attested also in the Privilège aux Bretons (c. 1240), an Old French song that mocks the customs and occupations of impoverished Breton immigrants to thirteenth-century France.

A Grammar of Akabea

This grammar of Akabea is the first published descriptive grammar of a traditional language of the Great Andamanese family and the first grammar of a traditional Great Andamanese language written to current linguistic standards. Akabea died out in the 1920s, but was extensively documented in the late nineteenth century by two British administrators, Edward Horace Man and Maurice Vidal Portman. Although neither was a trained linguist, their material nonetheless provides a sufficient basis for a reliable analysis of Akabea grammar, especially its morphology and phrasal and clausal syntax, although there are inevitable limitations on our understanding of Akabea phonology, clause combining, and discourse structure. The published grammar is accompanied by an online appendix providing a diplomatic edition with commentary and analysis of the single most valuable resource for Akabea grammatical analysis, Portman’s Dialogues. For the first time, linguists will have access to an extensive and reliable grammatical description of a traditional Great Andamanese language, thus enabling Akabea to take its rightful place as an object of scientific study among the languages of the world. This is all the more important in that the language exhibits a number of cross-linguistically rare phenomena, such as a rich system of somatic (body-part) prefixes and the phenomenon of Verb Root Ellipsis, whereby under certain circumstances the root of a verb may be absent, leaving behind a grammatical word consisting solely of affixes. The work will also contribute to a deeper interdisciplinary understanding of the history and prehistory of the indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman Islands.