OLD SLAVONIC GOSPELS

£12,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

Extremely rare and very attractive Lviv edition of this illustrated Old Slavonic Naprestolnoe, i.e. liturgical Tetraevangelia or Altar Gospel Book, intended for readings during the divine liturgy and throughout the church year, the binding preserving fragments of a contemporary engraved silver Gospel book cover, incontrovertibly from the same Slavonic context and most likely recovered from the book’s original boards. The book contains readings from the Gospels, Acts, and, at the end, an Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar and table of contents. Liturgical Tetraevangelia were the most common sort of printed Gospel books. The first printed edition of the Old Slavonic Gospels was at Tárgovişte, Romania in 1512, derived from a centuries-old manuscript legacy beginning with the C9th missions of Cyril and Methodius, who translated the Gospels and liturgical texts from Greek. Between 1512 and the C18th there were over one hundred printed editions of Cyrillic liturgical Tetraevangelia. Broadly these can be divided into two groups that follow the regional ‘recensions’ in the manuscript tradition, which were introduced during the medieval period: the South Slavonic group, in the Middle Bulgarian and Serbian recension of Church Slavonic, and the East Slavonic group, influenced by the Russian recension and the Ostrog and Moscow printing traditions, into which this Gospel book falls. Sliozka’s two editions, of 1644 and 1665, have very distinctive subscriptions, i.e. closing formulae at t

• Binding: Hardcover

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