Hagiographic themes in pre-modern Croatian literature (CroHagio)

The project focuses on studying hagiographic texts in pre-modern Croatian literature. The corpus of texts to be analyzed will primarily be based on a considerable number of Croatian Glagolitic breviaries and miscellany manuscripts, such as Pariški zbornik (1375), Vinodolski zbornik (15th century), Petrisov zbornik (1458), Tkonski zbornik (16th century), Žgombićev zbornik (16th century) and Grškovićev zbornik (16^th century). In addition, later literary adaptations of certain saints’ lives, including works by Bartol Kašić, Hilarion Gašparoti and Antun Kanižlić, are occasionally included.

Apart from hagiographical texts in the narrower sense, thematically related works such as Miracles of Our Lady, apocrypha and sermons on saints (e.g., Blagdanar, Discipuli) are also analyzed, as all these texts form a diverse group of medieval devotional literature.

In addition, the phenomena of performativity and intertextuality as well as the reflections of Marian devotion in poetry, narrative prose and didactic prose will also be examined in the course of this multi-year project. Certain motifs, characters, and themes will be traced from their earliest evidence in medieval Croatian literature to later adaptations in works of the Renaissance, Baroque and Enlightenment.

The digitization of selected hagiographic texts will take place in several stages. In the first phase, the transliterated texts will be entered into the Beram database (beram.stin.hr). In the second phase, the same texts will be published in their transcribed form on the project’s website to make them accessible to a wider academic and professional community. The hagiographic texts will be processed in XML format in the third phase.

By contributing to the creation of an anthology of Croatian Glagolitic texts, which is expected to be published in English by two renowned American publishers specializing in medieval literature, the project aims to increase the visibility of Croatian medieval literature internationally.

In line with the strategy and mission of the Old Church Slavonic Institute, this research project envisages philological (textological, literary-historical, literary-theoretical and comparative) exploration of one of the most important segments of Croatian medieval written tradition, namely the various genres of hagiographic literature and related forms. This includes, where possible, the identification of sources, their analysis and the preparation of critical editions. All Croatian texts (written in Glagolitic, Cyrillic and Latin script) will be studied within the wider framework of the European medieval literary, cultural and intellectual phenomena.