Evangelium Cyrillicum Gothoburgense : A Codicological, Palaeographical, Textological and Linguistic Study of a Church Slavonic Tetraevangel

Evangelium Cyrillicum Gothoburgense, ECG, a tetraevangel treasured in Göteborg University Library, has been studied from several aspects. A codicological study showed that the MS bears signs of earlier restoration and that some leaves are missing at the beginning and at the end. The watermark is a "boar", and the date of ECG is believed to be 1605-1625 on the basis of an identical watermark in another, Ukrainian, tetra, Hil, dated 1615. A palaeographical study of the script and ornament revealed some features characteristic of the 16th c., and others of the 17th c., generally reminiscent of a Moldavian hand.

The textological findings are the unusual order of the articles, resembling a few tetras from Serbia and Moldavia, different numbering of the pericopes, typical of Greek and early Slavonic MSS; and the long versions of the Prologues to the Gospels of St Mark and St John. The Menologion contains Serbian and Athonite saints, not found in East Slavonic MSS. The Gospel text in ECG, when compared with the Ostrog Bible of 1581, agreed largely with that of the fourth redaction, although not entirely. In a search of the sources of the textological differences, a collation between ECG and the other fourth redaction texts showed that LUB, an unpublished 16th c. East Slavonic tetra, is most in accord with ECG while Hil, contemporary with ECG, agrees most the Ostrog Bible. More agreement with ECG in the same readings was found in earlier tetras: a Bulgarian, Bani'ko tetraevagel, and a Serbian, Vukanovo lectionary.

The scribe's Church Slavonic has a Great Russian base and over it a layer of South Slavonic, mostly Middle Bulgarian, orthographical, morphological and phonological features. Traits differing from the Great Russian base have parallels in Ukrainian and also to a lesser extent in Belorussian and Western Great Russian manuscripts. The accentuation of ECG and Ostrog is identical in about three-quarters of cases; in the remainder, the pen-ultimate stress is the most characteristic feature of the ECG. Along with the penultimate stress there is a striving for a columnar stress pattern. This accent pattern conforms essentially to the dialectal accentuation in the West Boiko area of western Ukraine, thus supporting the scribe's information on his origins, namely, that he was from Rybotycze, not far from Boiko.

In conclusion, much is known about the scribe and his Church Slavonic, but his antegraph remains unknown although many of the features in ECG have been identified as Moldavian or Bulgarian or Serbian or Athonite. The fact that a contemporary tetra, Hil, is almost a copy of Ostrog and that another tetra, ECG, dissimilar to Ostrog, was copied at the same time in Rybotycze shows that different antegraphs were used. An interesting task for the future is the search of the ECG antegraph.