Slavonic translation of Dioptra of Philippos Monotropos

The Dioptra, authored in 1095 by a Byzantine monk named Philippos (later on known as Monotropos), is a lengthy didactic poem consisting of five books, the bulk of which is written in Decapentasyllabic verses (over 7000 altogether), with extensive prose chapters attached. The book titled Klauthmoi, or Placeve in Slavonic, precedes the other ones in the Greek urtext (version "Y" according to E. AUVRAY) as well as in the Slavonic translation, but follows after them in the early redaction of the Greek text termed version "X". This comparatively short and discrete book represents a mourning poem in which a contrite monk, addressing his own soul, emphatically requests penitence by visualising death, the hereafter, the Last Judgement, as well as the ensuing agony of the sinners and the joy of the righteous. The remaining books are composed as a dialogue between flesh (sarx) and soul (psyche), in which, against expectation, the latter interrogates the former. The questions, many of which are again orientated to the afterlife and connected with a recurring demand for penitence, revolve around religious topics such as the Coming of the Antichrist and the Resurrection of the Dead. In its instructions the flesh quotes extensively from the Holy Scripture and the writings of numerous church fathers. Additionally, elements from the fields of traditional natural philosophy and psychology are included as well. Especially the theory of the four "humours", i.e. the bodily fluids blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile, which correlate to the four elements and are supposed to determine a man`s character, is elaborated extensively. Thus, the Dioptra, and especially its dialogical parts, forms a true compendium of contemporaneous theological and philosophical thought. Presumably, it was this incorporation of wide-ranging (pseudo-)secular knowledge into a religious construct which, together with the appealing presentation as a versified conversation, accounted for the wide dissemination of the Greek Dioptra, which is attested by approximately 80 manuscripts. The Slavonic translation, which was presumably created in one of the Middle Bulgarian literary centres of the second half of the fourteenth century, was to become even more popular than the original, as almost 200 testimonies containing either the complete poem or extracts of it demonstrate. The larger part of the present volume is dedicated to the transmission history of the Slavonic Dioptra. In a first step, the relationship of the Slavonic text to the Greek original is set out. Relying on a great number of common characteristic features, the translation can unequivocally be assigned to a branch within the transmission of the Greek text (Y3). Over the course of time the Slavonic version of the Dioptra was subjected to more or less systematic amending, which in two cases resulted in separate recensions of the text; these are examined in the ensuing chapter. At an early stage of its transmission, the initial translation (recension I) was revised with the help of a Greek manuscript belonging to version X, which yielded recension II. The third recension, termed Ib, is based on a MS of recension I, to which East Slavonic scribes added certain textual units at the beginning of the poem and at its end (in fact we presumably deal with a scribal inscription and an accompanying letter). Subsequently, the manuscript transmission of the Slavonic Dioptra is reviewed. All available MSS were thoroughly described. The descriptions focus not only on codicology and palaeography, but also on the literary context of the poem as well as on textologically relevant aspects. Names of persons and places occurring in the inscriptions to the codices are listed in indices following the descriptive part. The kinship relations between the testimonies germane to the edition were determined predominantly on the basis of common errors, which were weighted according to their significance. Hence, all independent and some important dependent MSS are contained in the stemma codicum. The examination of the transmission of the Slavonic Dioptra is completed by an analysis of the spreading of the poem over the Slavia orthodoxa. In addition, this volume contains the critical edition of a first part of the poem, namely of the prefaces, the first book (i.e. the Klauthmoi/Placeve), and the supplements of recension Ib. The text is based on the codex Leopolitanus (L`viv NB NANU im. Stefanyka MV-418), the only fully preserved testimony in the Middle Bulgarian redaction of the initial translation. A critical apparatus containing the relevant readings of all independent manuscripts and of some important codices descripti (up to 40 manuscripts) is attached to the text. Since the character of the Slavonic version of the Dioptra is determined by the rigorous imitation of the Greek model, it is contrasted with the Greek manuscript most closely related to the lost immediate prototype of the translation (Vaticanus gr. 1893). The Greek parallel text is complemented by an apparatus criticus, comprehending the variations of the other five manuscripts of the branch the prototype belonged to. The mistakes in Leopolitanus and Vaticanus, that is, their aberrations from the reconstructable text of the Slavonic archetype and the Greek prototype of the translation respectively, are marked by italics and brackets; the corresponding correct readings in the critical apparatuses are also indicated by italics. The second apparatus to the Slavonic text contains the emendations of recension II; the corresponding apparatus on the Greek side comprises the variants of a MS closely related to the one with which the Slavonic translation was revised. The edition is completed by a German translation, to which brief annotations focusing on differences between original and translation are attached.