Freising manuscripts

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The Freising Manuscripts (also Freising Folia, Freising Fragments, or Freising Monuments; Slovene Brižinski spomeniki, German Freisinger Denkmäler, Latin Monumenta Frisingensia, Slovak Frizinské pamiatky) are the first Roman-script continuous text in a Slavic language and the oldest document in the Slovene language. It is important to note they did not influence its further development.

A page from Freising Manuscripts

The monuments consisting of three texts in the oldest Slovene dialect were discovered bound into a Latin codex (manuscript book) in Freising (Slovene Brižinje, Brižine or Brižinj), Germany. In 1803 the manuscript came to the Bavarian State Library in Munich and Brižinski spomeniki were discovered there in 1807.

Four parchment leaves and a further quarter of a page have been preserved. Linguistic, stylistic and contextual analyses reveal that these are church texts of careful composition and literary form.

The precise date of the origin of the Freising Manuscripts cannot be exactly determined; the original text was probably written in the 9th century. In this liturgic and homiletic manuscript, three Slovene records were found and this miscellany was probably an episcopal manual (pontificals). Brižinski spomeniki in it were created between 972 and 1093, most likely before 1000. The main support for this dating is the writing, which was used in the centuries after Charlemagne and is named Carolingian minuscule.

In the 8th century the early medieval Slovene state Karantania joined the union with Bavaria and during the time of the writing of the two manuscripts (sermons on sin and repentance, a confessional form), bishop Abraham was active (from 957 to 994) in Freising who also acquired a large estate of land in the Creina province around Škofja Loka (now central Slovenia) and in Carinthia around Wörthersee lake (now part of Austria, with a Slovene minority). It is believed that the manuscripts were written in the Möll River valley, Carinthia. For this reason some linguists (e.g. Jernej Kopitar and Rajko Nahtigal) linked Abraham closely to the origin of the Freising Manuscripts and, without any firm evidence, attributed to him the authorship of one of the texts and suspected that he was of Slovene origin.

The manuscripts are still kept at the Bavarian State Library in Munich and have left it only twice. In the 1970s they were exhibited in the Vatican City and in May and June 2004 they were exhibited at the National and University Library in Ljubljana (a notice in Slovene).

Before the Second World War a facsimile of the Freising Manuscripts was published by Silvester Škerl at Akademska Založba in Ljubljana.

[edit] References

Brižinski spomeniki - Monumenta Frisingensia (Znanstvenokritična izdaja), ZRC SAZU, Inštitut za slovensko literaturo in literarne vede 2004 (English summary and English translation of all three manuscripts)