The 10th century Freising Manuscripts (FM) are the oldest Slovenian text and the oldest Slavic text in Latin alphabet. For Slovenians, they are the very first document of national identity.
The present digital edition of the FM is based upon the printed critical edition, published by the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SAZU 1992, 1993, ZRC SAZU 2004).
The digital edition comprises several new materials and joins them together in an integration of digital image, text and sound. It includes:
A page for general-purpose use and school-reading of the Freising Mss. is included in this edition, as well as a thematic map of the Carinthia region, where the FM were used.
The greater part of the texts can be presented on your screen by the fonts which are
embedded in your computer. Special characters are needed only in diplomatic and phonetic transcriptions and
in the Old Church Slavonic parts of the Glossary. For this reason, FM are available in HTML format in two
versions. The first, accurate version presents all the special characters, but does so by use of
non-standard characters, where the font ZRCola is needed. The other version of HTML makes use of standard
Unicode characters only, but for deficiency that the output on the screen is not completely accurate: the
missing special characters are mapped into the nearest standard Unicode characters; they are presented in
grey colour. The user can shift between both versions on the top of each HTML page. For presentation of the
accurate HTML, the “00 ZRCola” and “01 CERKola” fonts must be installed on your computer as
The digital edition of FM is originally written in XML in conformance with the
The Freising Mss. are (in HTML as well as in TEI-XML) freely available on-line on the
pages of the project
Clm 6426, which also contains the Freising Manuscripts, came into being – as Milko
The codex dimensions are as follows: the height of a parchment folio is 25.6 cm, the length 20.8 cm (measured on folio 78), the thickness of the codex is 5.9 cm with the covers (3.7 cm without the covers). It comprises 169 foliated and 2 unnumbered parchment sheets. The latter two are inscribed with the text of a psalm written in a standard Gothic script of c. 1300; they remained part of the binding until the restoration made before the Second World War.
Clm 6426 is not a particularly representative codex for the time and place of its origin (Bavaria in the tenth and eleventh centuries), since it was written on parchment differing considerably in quality from fine and transparent to stiff and thick, in the most diverse ways (in a block, in columns; with a varying number of lines) and in inks that are also of very unequal quality. It is famous only because it contains fragments in Slovenian on folios 78, 78v and 158v–161v.
Compared with the other texts in Clm 6426, the Freising Manuscripts themselves are written on quite good quality parchment (especially fol. 78) and with sufficiently good quality ink, the colour of which tends to brown.
The Latin texts in Clm 6426 are mostly homilies and orations by the Church Fathers and medieval writers, and to a lesser extent texts for liturgical purposes. Other short fragments belong to ecclesiastical law or are later registers of names. So far researchers have only enumerated these writings, but in this article the authorship of almost half of the texts is determined and any previous publications of them (with the place of publication) are established. For those texts where authorship and previous publication are still unknown, there is the hope that such details can be found with the aid of electronically treated lists of the beginnings of texts, as promised in the near future by various publishing houses. This survey has confirmed the conviction held so far that Clm 6426 was a handbook for the use of a certain bishop, since writings of the same type which would be used by priests have not been preserved from that period.
The study of the Freising Manuscripts carried out so far (especially by V.
This study tests the above hypotheses with the help of both older and more recent
paleographical and historical literature (B.
At the same time a short survey is given of the development of the Carolingian minuscule and the tenth and eleventh century minuscules arising from it in the region where the FM were used.
The present edition comprises a diplomatic and critical transcription of the FM and
compares all the extant scientifically most relevant copies of this kind (diplomatic:
Information about scribal corrections (R. W.
The introductory texts to the diplomatic and critical transcriptions explain the alphabet system of former transcriptions and the present one, as well as the interpretation and accentual diacritics. Solutions to all the abridgments (abbreviations, suspensions, contractions) in the FM text are also explained at length.
This textual and critical transcription attempts to follow the demands of current editing principles as faithfully as possible.
This study presents the nature of the phonetic transcriptions of the Freising Manuscripts
in the following FM editions:
Our phonetic transcription is basically that of Ramovš, but it differs in the following
points:
The translation of the FM into modern standard Slovenian has a relatively extensive
tradition. The translators were: Franc
The main starting-point of the new translation is the reliably summarized historical semantics of the text. It differs most from previous translations in being more radical in archaizing. The return to the original is immediately noticeable in the external, graphic division of the text into the original short lines as found in the FM. The entire linguistic structure of the translation is also brought closer to the original manner of expression, from the choice of vocabulary and word forms to sentence syntax. So far as possible the original rhetoric and style are preserved in the text's figurative nature, whether at the syntactic, lexical or phonetic level. The placement of punctuation marks is also arranged not only according to the sense of the text but also to a speaker's articulation, in harmony with the new critical transcription. The choice of upper case letters is related to the particular and elevated significance which the prayer of confession or the homily ascribes to the persons of the Godhead. Nevertheless the translators' archaizing recognizes certain limits; it cannot allow details that are incomprehensible to the modern reader. It must remain within the framework of the current Slovenian language and orthography. Footnotes on points of language, cultural history and theology aim to clarify all the more difficult passages.
The translation has been jointly prepared by the members of the editorial board.
The intralingual translation into contemporary Slovenian is followed by translations into
Latin, German and English. The Latin translation of the FM already has its own tradition, with K.
In German, K. Detlef
The English rendering by G. Ch.
All editions of the FM have devoted suitable attention to the vocabulary of the texts. Ever since the edition of Köppen-Vostokov (1827), the glossaries have become increasingly systematic and more professionally arranged (Vondrák 1896, Kolarič-Pogačnik 1968). They have endeavoured to include all the words and forms, yet each edition lacks something.
The starting-point for the alphabetical arrangement in this glossary is the critical transcription. Each vocabulary item (altogether 579) has its headword with grammatical category, followed by the notation in international phonetic script. Whenever the basic form of the word does not occur in the FM, the reconstruction is indicated with an asterisk. Translations of the word are then given in modern Slovenian, Latin, German, English and in Old Church Slavonic. Semantically they follow the translations of the text in this edition. Finally, all forms of the headword with the context are quoted, arranged according to grammatical categories. Headwords that lack this information are linked with the basic headword by the cross-referencing abbreviation "gl." (=cf.).
The glossary does not give information about the various solutions to individual textual cruxes, since these are to be found in the notes and commentaries of this edition.
Short catalogues of publications of the FM and of the literature on the manuscripts have
so far been published in various bibliographies (
The present bibliography provides details of FM editions and related literature published so far. In addition to works that treat the manuscripts as a whole, it catalogues works that present judgments and findings concerning the FM from the standpoint of history, philology, language, literary history. Of those containing only the FM text, the older works (nineteenth century) are taken into account, while more recent works are represented only by those that are interesting or important for their transcriptions, translations or accentuation. Citations of secondary school textbooks are also restricted to the nineteenth century.
The bibliography is arranged chronologically, the entries within one year being given in alphabetical order of authors and titles.