The Scientific Centre of Excellence for Croatian Glagolitism

The aim of the project is to develop an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for the study of Glagolitic scriptoria. As the subject of the research, the manuscripts from Beram (near Pazin) have been chosen, since there are strong indications that there was a Glagolitic scriptorium there in the 14th and the 15th centuries. Those manuscripts will be analysed linguistically, textologically, literary-theoretically, paleographically, liturgically and art-historically, and all available data about them and about Beram from that period will be gathered. The research could later be applied on other Glagolitic scriptoria.

The main result of the project after five years will be the publication and thorough analysis of the 2nd Beram breviary from the 15th century. A digital edition will also be prepared, which users will be able to search by linguistic, textological, liturgical, art-historical and paleographical parameters. In other words, they will be able to find the information about all the biblical and homiletic readings contained within the codex, about the ligatures, abbreviations and types of letters as well as all the relevant grammatical information, for example, a list of all the nouns, verbs or other parts of speech, all the confirmations and forms of certain cases, tenses and the like. A scientific conference will be held on the Beram scriptorium where the results of this multidisciplinary research will be presented. The conference proceedings will be an inevitable source of references for the research on other book-copying centres and on Glagolitic manuscripts in general.

The results should also be interesting to philologists who study texts written in other Croatian scripts, Latin and Cyrillic. In the following five years the other three Beram codices would be analysed and prepared for publication in the same manner, thus concluding the research of manuscripts of one scriptorium, which would be a unique achievement within Slavic studies in general.