Itineraries of Medieval Slavic Legal Texts: Byzantine “Farmer’s Law” in Ms. Slav. 466 from Hilandar Monastery

Abstract

The author aims to summarize, analyze, and supplement the knowledge about the Slavic copy of the Byzantine Farmer’s Law in Ms. Slav 466 from Hilandar monastery, second quarter of the 15th century. It has long been in the focus of Serbian philology and history of law. The current observations refer to the following spheres: the relationship between text and manuscript, the axiological significance of precedential texts in culture, the importance of this copy for Byzantine-Slavic interactions in the legal system, the uninterrupted cultural role of Holly Mountain’s monasteries for Eastern Christian culture. The Slavic copy of the “Farmer’s Law” in Hil. 466 is unique by structure and peculiarities. The manuscript testifies to the only known combination of the Farmer’s Law and the Prochiron in the South Slavic tradition. It is hypothesized that this combination was a conscious choice of the compilers of the collection influenced by tendencies in the post-Byzantine tradition. It corresponded to the strong anti-heretical line of the overall manuscript, inherited from the struggles against heresies on Mount Athos in the 14th century. The manuscript is a typical monastic miscellany. The linguistic nature of the “Farmer‘s Law” copy reveals its undoubted South-Slavic character, without russification, strongly influenced from the Greek protograph. Copy and translation may probably be of close chronology. Owing to being a precedential text, the Slavonic copy of the “Farmer’s Law” in Ms. Slav. 466 holds a special place in the attempts of reconstructing the stages and processes of reception of the Byzantine juridical legacy among South Slavs, of establishing the geographic-areal scope and the cultural itineraries of the spread of this text.