OLD BELIEVERS.

£20,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Bible: Revelation 1-20, An Old Believers' illustrated miscellany, including a rare calendar with pictorial hand-drawn diagrams - a genre scarce both on the market and institutionally - and amuletic woodblock prints of the Cavalry Cross. "Old Believer book culture inherited and developed an ancient tradition that had already manifested itself in the first century of Russian book production: the aesthetic perception of the book as a synthesis of the arts - verbal, visual, and sometimes musical" (Medvedeva, p. 70). While they saw printing itself "as a symbol of detested Tsarist authority" (Carey, p. 207), Old Believers also "rejected many liturgical and orthographic reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church, […] and often held on to the oldest available editions and produced new texts in the oldest possible styles" (Rogers, p. 28). The illustrated almanac provides the computus of Easter and movable feasts, using the "Ruka Damaskina" ("Hand of John of Damascus") mnemonic diagrams with calculations arranged across hand palms. Widespread in medieval Europe, they were discarded by Nikon's reforms in 1652, but retained by the Old Believers as a form of opposition to the modernization of the Russian rite. The almanac also includes a calendar of eighty saints, and several tables for an eternal calendar. Three leaves are filled with apotropaic block-stamped icons of the Orthodox Calvary Cross, which places the production of this manuscript in northern Russia. "Among the unique phenomena of

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