This "Sluzebnik," owned by Isidore of Kiev, the much-travelled Russian delegate to the Council of Ferrara-Florence, is a collection of liturgical texts and contains notes in his own hand. The texts include the liturgies of John Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Philotheus, the Presanctified, and the Presanctified Gifts. Written in a large uncial Cyrillic script of the Russian type, the manuscript is particularly striking on account of its neo-Byzantine ornamentation and its initials, mainly of a geometric, floral design. The text on display is the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts.
Vat. slav. 14 fol. 32 recto orient21 AH.02
A novelty in many respects, Teseo Ambrogio's "Introductio" is one of the first studies in comparative linguistics to refer to several oriental languages. Although it is mainly about Armenian and Syriac, it also contains information about Samaritan, Arabic, Coptic, Slavonic, and Ethiopic. It is the first occasion on which Syriac was presented to a European readership and on which Syriac types were used. Armenian types, on the other hand, had been employed in Venice as early as 1511. In addition to the features which make the book so important as a work of scholarship, it is one of the rare examples of a book set by dictation.
The pages illustrated show, on the left, the Lord's Prayer in Syriac, taken from Luke 11:2-4 (mistakenly given as Luke 1), with an interlinear transcription of the Syriac in the Roman alphabet and a literal Latin translation. On the right is the Lord's Prayer in Armenian, taken from Matthew 6:9-13, with the same system of interlinear transcription and translation. The Lord's Prayer was widely used as a text for elementary linguistic exercises: the first European Arabists nearly all used it, until Joseph Justus Scaliger expressed his misgivings about its benefits for any practical knowledge of the language.
R.G. or. IV 355 fols. 184 verso-185 recto orient22 AH.30