Catalogue Of Manuscripts

The world of Byzantine manuscripts is fascinating but also confusing. Although they play an important part in modern studies on the history of Christian liturgy and on the textual history of the Bible, a clear overview of the vast amount of these manuscripts in their many different forms is lacking. A new approach in their cataloguing is called for. The present volume brings together a number of specialists in the field of Byzantine, liturgical and Biblical studies with the aim to develop a new methodology for codicological research of the Byzantine manuscripts, taking seriously the original environment of the integral codices in the monasteries and the churches in which they were manufactured and functioned.

The present catalogue gives a detailed description of Arabic manuscripts held in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The majority of these were used for teaching purposes in the religious schools during and after the Ottoman occupation of Hungary.

The book is a definitive documentation of a significant segment of the Greek manuscript legacy -- the organic library of the famous monastery of the Theotokos (Bačkovo) near the city of Asenovgrad in Bulgaria. It provides comprehensive scholarly descriptions of thousands of texts, major and minor, that served the liturgical needs and helped form the mind-set of the Orthodox monastic community on the Balkans.