4to (184 x 236 mm). Russian Church Slavonic manuscript on paper. 366 ff., ca. 20 lines of Cyrillic half-uncial in three hands. Watermarks: arms of Amsterdam and Pro Patria. Rubricated titles and initials, decorated headpieces, initials, and borders; 143 full-page colour-wash miniatures within decorated borders. Contemporary Russian red velvet over bevelled wooden boards, 2 brass clasps with velvet-covered leather straps, brass furniture on rear cover, all edges gilt and goffered; extremities and scattered small areas of covers and joints rubbed. Brass clasps and three short clean tears to spine velvet repaired, small loss at foot of rear joint. A little worming to pastedown margins. Lower outer corners and margins finger-soiled, one long clean horizontal tear to a miniature, repaired on blank verso without loss, occasional minor very light marginal waterstaining or ink marks, a couple of tiny wormholes to first and last gathering, overall an excellent example.

The volume assembles five key didactic and devotional texts from the Old Believer manuscript tradition, blending biblical, hagiographic, apocryphal, and popular material in a form designed to instruct as much as to move. The Passion Narrative recounts the events of Holy Week; the Life of St Basil the New with the visions of St Theodora and St Gregory unfolds the punishments of sinners and the posthumous passage of the soul; the Legend of Joseph follows the patriarch from birth to Egypt and Pharaoh’s dream; the final two texts, conceived as picture books with minimal text, treat Creation, the destiny of the soul, and filial redemption from Purgatory.

Particularly striking are the eschatological scenes in the vision of St Theodora, where the soul passes through the aerial toll-houses and confronts demons who record sins on scrolls and attempt to drag it to hell. Elsewhere the manuscript dwells on the Harrowing of Hell, the Crucifixion, Cain and Abel, the decay of the body after death, and the charitable rescue of a mother's soul, shaping coherent moral instruction through image as much as text.

Old Believer book culture regarded the manuscript as a synthesis of verbal and visual art, and its communities deliberately sustained archaic textual and pictorial modes in resistance to both ecclesiastical reform and the authority of print. Produced after the schism provoked by the reforms of Patriarch Nikon and the Synod of 1666, manuscripts of this kind linked persecuted communities to an imagined continuity with Ancient Russia while serving as vehicles of devotion, instruction, and confessional identity. The present manuscript is thus both a major survival of Old Believer visual culture and an unusually luxurious witness to its devotional life, preserved with its full cycle of miniatures, ornamental apparatus, and sumptuous contemporary binding.

Provenance

1) Morozov family, until 1994.

2) Sam Fogg, London, January 1994.

3) Martin Schøyen, with his bookplate and manuscript number MS 1799 to front pastedown.

Schoyen MS 1799. Cf. F. Carey, The Apocalypse and The Shape of Things To Come (Toronto, 1999). N. I. Medvedeva, “Repertuar staroobrjadcheskoj rukopisnoj knigi v Rossii: XVIII-XX vv.”, Vestnik SPbGIK 17 (2013). D. Rogers, The Old Faith and the Russian Land (Ithaca, 2010).