The Physiologus in Balkan Cyrillic manuscripts: from textological to socio-rhetorical approach
The Physiologus in Balkan Cyrillic manuscripts: from textological to socio-rhetorical approach

Summary/Abstract: During the last 30 years, I have collected nearly 50 mixed-content miscellanies in Bulgarian, Serbian, and Walachian-Moldavian tradition from the end of 13th to the beginning of 18th c. The core of their content is composed of a parabiblical works mainly about characters and events from the Old Testament, of short narratives, saint’s lives, miracles and so-called “sermo humilis”. The versions of Physiologus are included in a big part of this type of manuscripts. My textological comparison had shown that mixed-content miscellanies often showed evidence of a stable content – some of them include the same constituent works in the same order, regardless that the manuscripts had no obvious genetic relationship. These correspondences were sufficiently numerous and distinctive that they could not be merely fortuitous, and the only sensible interpretation was that even when the operative organizational principle was not based on independently identifiable criteria, such as the church calendar, liturgical function, or thematic considerations, mixed-content miscellanies (or, at least, portions of their contents) nonetheless fell into types. The topic of the presentation is how and why the Physiologus is included in the miscellanies and what is the result of the interactions between texts.

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