Register of Older Slovenian Manuscripts

Slovenian literature in the long period between the Reformation in the 16th century and Romanticism in the 19th century appears in a new light when viewed through manuscripts. As in the case of other literatures, we have known Slovenian literature of the modern period only through the prism of printed books. Manuscripts have been neglected by older literary scholars. As a result, many Slovenian manuscripts from previous centuries are completely unknown.

That's why at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, we have created the Register of Older Slovenian Manuscripts, using TEI Publisher to display our TEI encoded data. Each <msDesc> description combines four separate blocks of data according to the guidelines: identifier, manuscript content, codicological description and manuscript history.

This is a small but long-term project begun in 2011 that we are working on here and there, but it is an important support for other research. So far we have described 200 manuscripts in the register, for a half of them, digital images are provided (14.000 pages).

Most of the manuscripts are anonymous, but it has almost always been possible to determine whether a manuscript was written in a monastery, or by a diocesan priest, or in a bourgeois environment, or among peasants in a village, or by a churchwarden, or a schoolteacher, etc. We have therefore created a typology of these social contexts in which the manuscripts came into existence, and labelled our <msDesc> according to this typology. The TEI Publisher has shown excellent agility and speed in this and similar requests.

Our manuscript descriptions and digital facsimiles reveal a hitherto unknown reality: from the 17th to the 19th century, many texts were produced in Slovenian which, for economic and ideological reasons, could not be printed but were circulated only in transcript form. This has led to the discovery of a new phenomenon: the Slovenian manuscript culture of the Baroque period and its long-lived extensions into the 19th century.

If the printed book was the fundamental form of existence of Slovenian literature in the 16th century (or print coexisted with manuscripts, but the manuscripts perished), then in the 17th and 18th centuries it was the other way round: for a long time the manuscript was the fundamental form of existence of Slovenian literature, the book sometimes accompanied the manuscript, sometimes not. Our Register faithfully records the complicated relationships between printed books, which were no longer available in later times, and manuscripts, which restored and transmitted the texts of these inaccessible books.

Manuscript culture made writing and reading possible for both peasant writers and educated writers in the cities and in monasteries. It adapted flexibly to Slovenian dialects and to the wishes of people in small communities, which is why manuscript copying persisted stubbornly even into the 19th century.