What exactly are Old Russian manuscripts? The most widespread type of manuscript with literary materials is the miscellany. The scribe copied various works onto quires which were then bound by the scribe himself or a binder. It also happened that the binder took quires written at different times by different […]

Texts were copied by scribes either across the whole sheet or in two columns (particularly if the sheets were large). It is customary to divide the script into three types—uncial, which had large, rounded letters that were not joined; various forms of semi-uncial, which was faster and less strict, occasionally […]

Manuscripts were originally written on specially treated animal skin. In Old Russia this leather had several names: it was called kozha (skin), telyatina (calf skin), and later khartia (this material was usually prepared from calf skins). The accepted term for this material is pergamen (parchment), named after the town of […]

Texts of literary works discovered in manuscripts are studied, first of all, from the point of view of whether or not they have been published. If the work is already known, it is essential to ascertain whether the text that has been found corresponds to the known texts, whether it […]

From the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there are several extant inventories, tables of contents and library catalogues, which suggests that already in Old Russia there was a need for systematised information about books: the table of contents for the twelve-volume Menology of Metropolitan Macarius (sixteenth cen­tury) compiled by the […]

1Lenin, V. I., Collected Works, Vol. I, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, p. 155. 2 Щепкин В. H. Русская палеография. Moscow, 1967 (first edition published in 1918-1920); Черепнин А. В. Русская палеография. Moscow, 1956; Лихачев Д. С. Текстология на материале русской литературы X-XVII вв. Second edition. Leningrad, 1983; Лихачев Д. С. […]