Technological Peculiarities of Old Russian Books as Reflected in Early Modern Inventories of Monastic Libraries

Abstract

The paper analyzes inventories of the late 15th–17th centuries from four major Russian monasteries: St Cyril’s of Belozersk, The Solovetsky monastery, Joseph-Volokolamsk monastery, and The Holy Trinity – St Sergius monastery. These inventories list the monasteries’ property for its safekeeping. The inventories of monastic libraries contain valuable information about the system of book keeping and the development of bibliography in Old Rus’. They also provide some clues for attribution of books, which can help in reconstructing the concepts of bookmaking technologies in Early Modern period. These technological notes in descriptions of books are organized according to the system created by the inventories compilers: the format, the binding, the artistic values, the type and technique of writing, the page’s composition, the writing material, the state of preservation. The paper shows that the major goal in creating these inventories was to single out the most important elements allowing to recognize the book. Yet the description of these elements was not uniform. The attention was mainly directed to external attribution of a book. From the second half of the 16th century the cursive writing and the so-called metnoe pismo (a sort of scrittura usuale) were already recognized as different from standard book writing and had to be distinguished and indicated in book inventories. The inventories reflected those characteristics of books that were important for the librarians and therefore shaped certain semantic structures in professional mentality of Old Russian bookmen. For modern scholars they can serve as markers that follow the process of the development of book technologies in Early Modern period.