Crit. edition of the Demetrius-Psalter and the Medical Folia

In 1975 a century find of old manuscripts was made in St. Catherine`s Monastery on Sinai, which included seven manuscripts in the first Slavic script, the Glagolitic, designed by the Teacher of Slavs, Constantine-Cyril around 863. One of these sources turned out to be nearly completely preserved and is called the Psalter of Demetrius due to later user entries. Inlaid into the psalter also three (of originally at least four) leaves with mostly herbal recipes for various symptoms of illness were found, the Medical Folia or Leaves. While the Psalter was most likely copied on Sinai by scribes from the Western Balkans around the middle of the 11th century, the Medical Folia are probably somewhat older and may have been written and supplemented in the Istria-Kvarner Islands area on the basis of a Bulgarian model. The text of the psalter is designed for church service and contains the first translation of the psalter into Slavic (also made by Constantine-Cyril), the Medical Folia the earliest Slavic medical text an unusual work against the background of the otherwise merely religious so-called Old Church Slavonic literature, which offers insight into the life of a monk healer and, correspondently, also influences of everyday language. Equally unusual are the extensive additions by Demetrius, which were made on Sinai towards the end of the 11th century and consist of personal notes and a remarkable prayer cycle, in which a Latin-Greek-Glagolitic abecedary is woven. Even if Demetrius composed the cycle only to a certain degree independently, while he took the rest partly from Bulgarian, partly from Bohemian originals (the so-called Gregory prayer, translated from Latin), he can be regarded as the first Serbian-Montenegrin writer known by name. After a facsimile and internet edition, the texts of these important manuscripts are now being presented in print for the first time in volume II of the Glagolitica Sinaitica series, each with text-critical comments. The text part is preceded by an extensive analysis part, in which first the treatises that have appeared since the facsimile edition, and then the questions already touched on about the place and time of writing, classification of the scribes, characteristics of the Psalter text as well as the text structure, content and language of the Demetrius entries and the medical instructions are treated; the latter chapters also contain glossaries of the texts. In order to give the readership access to the original, a data carrier with color and black-and-white recordings (in different spectra) of the manuscripts is attached to the volume. A corresponding chapter of the investigation part is devoted to the production and type of these photos, followed by a chemical analysis of the materials used in the production of the manuscripts achieved by X-ray spectroscopy as a further scientific part novels in the hitherto purely philological-historical presentation of such medieval sources.