THE REFERENCE APPARATUS IN THE BIBLE OF MAT THEW THE TENTH (1502–1507)

the reference apparatus was developed in the late 15 th – first half of the 16 th century.

The Bible of Matthew the Tenth, the predecessor to the biblical editions of Francysk Skaryna, shows how quickly and in what an unusual manner the reference apparatus was developed in the late 15 th  Along with changes in the script, the method of organizing the text of a book changed considerably in East Slavic manuscripts in the 14 th and 15 th centuries.Often, the only element used to distinguish between various parts of the codex in early manuscripts was the use of cinnabar headings and initials.Through their use, independent texts in a collection or chapters and sections in a large work could be separated from each other.The initials indicated the beginning of a new thought or phrase and helped to syntactically organize the text.However, cinnabar initials could not serve as a reference tool, a feature necessary in codices with a complex structure.The absence of a reference apparatus that would allow one to quickly find the desired text in a large codex made it difficult for the reader to work with the book.
This led to the emergence and development in the second half of the 14 thfirst half of the 15 th century of the reference apparatus: a variety of headers and footers in the top and bottom margins, as well as markings on the outer margin with the numbers of chapters, sections, verses, and pericopes.The emergence of a new type of book with a rich reference apparatus was facilitated by the Second South Slavic Influence which introduced and promoted the use of the New Liturgical Tetr in the East Slavic lands 1 .The importance of a reference apparatus increased by the end of the 15 th century with the advent of the printed book, the preparation of new translations, and the demand for complete sets of books, including for the complete Bible 2 .At the same time, we find scribes experimenting with various techniques -such as using different types of script, decoration, and markings within one codex -in order to organize the text structure in a new way for faster and easier use.
One manuscript especially rich in such experiments is the biblical collection of Matthew the Tenth, prepared in Vilnius and Suprasl Monastery in 1502-1507 (RASL, coll.Sreznevskii, II 75) 3 .The Bible of Matthew the Tenth is one of the unique attempts to prepare a complete corpus of the books of the Bible in Slavia Orthodoxa.The scribe compiled the Slavonic translations available to him, while also editing and supplementing them, and strove not only to create the most complete biblical collection, but also to provide it with various liturgical instructions.Matthew the Tenth was a skillful scribe, masterfully alternating scripts, switching between semi-uncial and book cursive.His manuscript, thus, is a treasure-trove for studying the features of book hands in Vilnius and Suprasl at the beginning of the 16 th century.
A distinctive feature of the Bible of Matthew the Tenth is the decor of the manuscript which contains an original miniature with scenes from the life of King David, as well as a significant number of various colorful initials.The scribe uses the decor not only for decoration, but also to attract the reader's attention, or to highlight various fragments of the text.In the Gospels, he uses black ink when describing the companions of Jesus or narrating the circumstances, blue ink -when describing the actions of Jesus, and gold ink -for the words of the Savior.
Matthew the Tenth was tasked with preparing a structurally complex text, since many Old Testament passages and all Gospel passages are used not only for private reading, but also liturgically.This prompted him to make liberal use of markings and numbering in the margins.Thus, he indicated the days of the week on which the passages are read and the pericope numbers, while also providing the incipits of the passages together with the calendar dates in the upper and lower margins.
The reference apparatus is especially plentiful in the New Testament books of the Bible of Matthew the Tenth.In the texts of the Apostles, chapter numbers in accordance with the division of Euthalius, with 'readings' and 'testimonies' from the Old Testament and references to the biblical books, are placed in the outer margins.In the Gospels, this placement is used for the numbers according to the canons of Eusebius.An abundance of various numbers forced Matthew the Tenth to alternate between cinnabar, blue, and black ink, and to appoint fixed places in the margin to different numerations: some numbers are written closer to the text in large numerals, others in the middle of the margin in small handwriting.In addition to these numerations, Matthew the Tenth also provided the verse numbering in the Old Testament books, the Epistles of the Apostles, and Revelation.The Epistles of the Apostles contain so many different numbers borrowed from the Euthalian Apparatus that it is difficult to understand what this or that specific numeral refers to and what it actually means.
For this reason, when numbering verses in the Epistles, Matthew the Tenth used non-Cyrillic alphabets and numeral systems of his own invention, and alternated them with the usual Cyrillic numerals.For example, in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, Matthew the Tenth used Greek letters for numbering, reproducing the system of Cyrillic numerals 4 .From the second half of the 15 th century, East Slavic scribes readily resorted to Greek styles of handwriting, so the use of a different alphabet in this case does not attract immediate attention.Only such letters as β and the minuscule (i.e.lowercase) η clearly indicate the use of the Greek and not the Cyrillic alphabet.The numerical values of the Greek letters fully correspond to those of the Cyrillic alphabet, so the numbering in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians does not provide us any information about the level of knowledge of Greek by Matthew the Tenth.
In the next text, the First Epistle to Timothy, Matthew the Tenth uses a modified alphabet to number the verses.This modified alphabet is based on the shapes of Greek and Latin letters, but with the addition of signs invented by Matthew, for example, to denote the numerals 1 and 20 5 .Some new graphemes are formed by adding an extra loop to a familiar letter: thus, the graphemes г (3) and ҇ (10) receive additional loops.The letter и remains the basis for the numeral 8.The numeral 7 is a mirror image of the letter з; Matthew resorts to the same technique -a mirror image of the numeral 5, similar to the Greek letter δ -when writing the numeral 20.Some characters are graphically similar to the abbreviations used in Latin manuscripts: for example, the numeral 2 corresponds to the Latin abbreviation pro.For the numeral 9, Matthew uses the minuscule and semi-uncial shape of the letter ѳ.The scribe begins by using the Cyrillic numeral а for 1; however, in the numbers 11 and 21 he uses another, invented designation for 1. Matthew the Tenth retains the Cyrillic character for 6 only - .Otherwise, numerals are formed in the same way as when writing in Cyrillic: in the tens, the units numeral is placed to the left of the numeral for 10, while in the twenties and subsequent decades, the units numeral is placed to the right of the tens numeral.
In the next text -the Second Epistle to Timothy -the scribe continues to use the Cyrillic alphabet for the numerals, but in the Epistle to Titus, he resorts to the Glagolitic alphabet 6 : 2=Ⰲ, 3=Ⰳ, 4=Ⰴ, 5=Ⰵ, 6=, 7=Ⰸ, 8=Ⰺ.The shape of the letters reveals that Matthew is not very confident in his command of the graphics of Glagolitic.The numeral 1 is written over a colorful initial, so it is not clearly visible; however, it looks more like the letter а with a long mast than the Glagolitic Ⰰ.The shape of the letters Ⰳ (3) and Ⰸ (7) is distorted.At the same time, Matthew assigns to the Glagolitic letters numerical values of the Cyrillic alphabet: he does not use in his numeral system the letters 'buki' (Ⰱ) and 'zhivete' (Ⰶ), which in the Glagolitic alphabet had numerical values of 2 and 7, respectively, but were not used to denote numerals in the Cyrillic system, which led to remaining letters of the Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets having different numerical values.For the numeral 6, he uses the Cyrillic character 'zelo' (), rather than the Glagolitic character (Ⰷ), and writes the Cyrillic character in a mirror image ().It is similar to using the Cyrillic character 'zelo' () in the First Epistle to Timothy.For the numeral 8, he uses the Glagolitic letter 'iota' (Ⰺ), probably confusing it with the letter 'izhe' (Ⰻ) which has the numerical value of 8 in Cyrillic.
The nature of the use of Glagolitic letters by Matthew the Tenth shows that he, in general, was familiar with their shapes (although he could not remember the shape of the Glagolitic letter 'zelo' -Ⰷ), but was not aware of their numerical values, and chose to use instead the system of numerals from the Cyrillic alphabet.The scribe's erudition was limited to general awareness of the graphics of the Glagolitic alphabet and was not sufficient to write or count in Glagolitic.
Staying true to the basic principle, Matthew the Tenth uses the Cyrillic numeral system to number the verses in the next text (the Epistle to Philemon), but invents a fictitious number system in the Epistle to the Hebrews 7 .In this case, Matthew the Tenth does not invent new graphemes, as in the First Epistle to Timothy, but resorts to Cyrillic letters, to which he assigns unusual numerical values, including the use of those letters of the Cyrillic alphabet that typically have no numerical value at all.Thus, the numerals 1 and 2 are denoted by the letters ѱ and ѯ, respectively.Starting with the number 3, Matthew uses the Cyrillic alphabetical order for the numerals, with two exceptions: he uses the letter с to denote the numeral 9 after the letter ж used to denote the numeral 8.This is not an accidental error, as was the case with the numeral 1 in the First Epistle to Timothy, but a deliberate choice, since for the numeral 19 Matthew also writes 9 by using с.
Starting from the numeral 10, the alphabetical order continues for the tens.The most unexpected feature here is the numeral 60 -д , composed of the numerals 6 and 10 and identical with the numeral 16.Evidently, the numeral 16 is formed in the usual way for Cyrillic numerals -by addition of the digits -while the value 60 here is obtained by their multiplication.Otherwise, the numerals are formed in the same way as when writing in Cyrillic: for the tens, the units numeral is placed to the left of the ten numeral; for twenty and higher, the units numeral is placed to the right of the tens numeral.
Finally, Matthew the Tenth does not limit himself to numbering.He uses special footnote signs in order to connect marginal glosses with the text.He needed to do this in only one place, when commenting the allegories in the Epistle to the Hebrews and indicating the names of the forefathers in the margins.Two glosses per line are used for this purpose, and Matthew preferred using special symbols for the footnotes, rather than numbering.As has been shown by Florentina Panchenko, these footnote symbols employ signs of musical notation 8 .Perhaps, he was prompted to this by the unusual system of designating footnotes in the Apostles with Commentaries invested by Marszałek Alexander Soltan in 1490 in the Holy Trinity Church in Vilnius 9 .This is the only direct source of Matthew the Tenth known to us -a manuscript from which he made various notes for using them in his Bible.The codex uses a glossing system with footnote signs of the most bizarre appearance.Undoubtedly, the practice of using intricate footnotes is based on the system of footnotes adopted in Byzantine manuscripts, as was shown by Igor Shevchenko and Olga Strakhova 10 .However, the Byzantine system, apparently, remained unknown to the scribes of Alexander Soltan's Apostle with Commentaries, and they came up with more than 300 signs of their own for the footnotes.It must be assumed that Matthew the Tenth was not familiar with the Byzantine system of footnotes either, and the graphic fantasies of the scribes of the Apostles with Commentaries prompted Matthew to develop his own system of footnotes and to use musical notation signs for this purpose.
Thus, the desire to improve the systems of references, additional indications, and numbering sometimes led to such an abundance of auxiliary indications that the compiler was forced to undertake unexpected experiments by introducing unusual numbering systems, as in the case of Matthew the Tenth.His innovations were not continued in the manuscript tradition and, along with other scribal experiments using original writing systems, they testify to the scribes' search for new means of expression and systematization of the text in the era of the birth of the printed book.