Песнивецът на цар Йоан Александър – хипотези за неговата история
The Psalter Of King John Alexander – Hypotheses About Its History

Summary/Abstract: The commentated psalter, ordered by the Bulgarian king John Alexander and copied in 1337, is known as the Pesnivets of John Alexander and also as the Sofia or Kuklen Pesnivets. It is kept in the Scientific Archive of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (NA-BAN 2). Its codicological and textological peculiarities, together with its history have been subjects of discussion since the time of its founding in the Kuklen monastery but they still cannot be explained in a satisfactory way. With regard to the envisaged edition of the manuscript this paper summarizes the main hypotheses rised dirung its study. The first hypothesis addresses the king’s commission and it assumes, after reconsidering the various statements and opinions tying to relate the year 1337 to a significant event in the king’s governing, that it was rather a momentary wish, expressed at a time when he had established his political position. The second hypothesis proposes an explanation of the very obvious rework of the manuscript by cutting two leaves at its middle, at ps. 77, and inserting there a gathering with the interpretations of the Creed and the Lord’s prayer. Again, the question is what could have provoked the change of the manuscript’s composition and when it happened, taking into account the fact that the additional gathering was copied by the first main scribe of the psalter. After rejecting the hypotheses of its later addition, which considered two events equally suitable for proclaiming king’s orthodoxy – the possible re-adressing of the manuscript in relation with his ktetorship in the Bachkovo monastery, or his role in convoking of the anti-heretical councils – a more pragmatic solution was tested. As the overal design of the manuscript is somewhat simple and the only miniature, in a sharp contrast with it, is painted on a single folio and put in the middle of the codex, it seems more plausible – and is supported by codicological evidence – that a decision to make the manuscript more appropriate for a ruler by changing its design was taken exactly at the moment when the copyist reached the middle of the psalms. As the two cut-off leaves were integral with the illuminated folio and the next one, they could have been still blank or with some text on them, therefore easier to sacrifice. Why a miniature representing Christ Ancient of Days was placed before ps. 77, is explicated in earlier publications of the author. To adorn the manuscript with the miniature, surrounded by inscriptions with the king’s titulatures, may have been planned together with including the additional texts. Therefore the latter were copied separately, in a single gathering. Regarding the non-aesthetic appearance of this bulky gathering now preceding the miniature, one recalls the remark of Benyo Tsonev in his catalogue that the original place of these folios might have been at the end of the manuscript. However, to whom belonged the idea of the incertions and when the last gathering was moved to its present place remains unknown. It must be emphasized though that the new composition of the image and the interpretative texts resulted in a unique and sophisticated ideological message. Next are offered hypotheses of the manuscript’s origin and its late history. It was agreed that the capital Tarnovo, as other scholars already claimed, was the most likely locality of the scribes’ team; and more, perhaps it was the royal chancellery around which the literary activity initiated by John Alexander began, provided that the script of the psalter is very similar to that of the Zograf monastery charter (1342) and that the codex itself testifies for an early stage of fulfilling royal orders. Whether the first trained scribes were monks from the hesychast circles suported by the king is another open question. The most extravagant hypothesis concerns the travel of Pesnivets to the Kuklen monastery, in vicinity to the Bachkovo monastery. A note in the psalter mentions the death of the Serbian despote George Branković and the only place where it could resonate was the Rila monastery, to which the relics of St John of Rila were translated from Tarnovo through the agency of Mara Branković, George’s daughter. In the monastery was copied the only other known commentated psalter with exactly the same interpretations of the Creed and Lord’s prayer placed at the mid-psalms. There is a vague evidence that Mara Branković made a donation to the Bachkovo monastery which could have included the Bulgarian king’s manuscript. Such a suggestion presuposes that the psalter was already in Rila together with other manuscripts which, as is known, came from Tarnovo, or that it accompanied the relics. However, the discrepancy between the dates of the transfer of the relics and the commemorative note, which was not current at the time, raises another problem. Unfortunately, there are no sources to support either these, or even the assumption that at some time books from the Bachkovo monastery library has been transferred to the neighbouring Kuklen monastery.

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