The First Vrbnik Missal is one of the most beautiful Croatian Glagolitic codices. However, this codex has hardly been the subject of independent study. Basic information about its content, language, script, and illumination is primarily found in bibliographies of Croatian Glagolitic texts.

The project’s primary objective is to produce a transliteration of the First Vrbnik Missal. The codex will be transliterated using the handwritten text recognition platform Transkribus. The transliterated text will then be uploaded to the Beram database (beram.stin.hr), thereby expanding the corpus of transliterated Croatian Glagolitic codices being developed within this database.

The transliteration of the codex is expected to stimulate and facilitate further independent research on various aspects of the First Vrbnik Missal. Since the transliteration process lays the essential groundwork for further study, it also opens up possibilities for future interdisciplinary research on this manuscript.

Additionally, the project will include linguistic analysis of the codex. The phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features of the First Vrbnik Missal will be examined. Previous literature—without in-depth linguistic analysis—has noted that the text was written in a vernacular-influenced Croatian Church Slavonic. This study will systematically identify which linguistic elements were inherited from Church Slavonic texts and which entered the language of the codex from Čakavian vernaculars of the second half of the 15th century.

project manager: Josip Galić
collaborator: Ana Šimić