Устност, език, текст и вариации в Словото за празници бабини на Йосиф Брадати
Orality, language, text and variation in the sermon Against old women’s feasts by Josif Bradati

Summary/Abstract: The article explores the Sermon against Old Women’s Feasts compiled around 1756 by Josif Bradati. The sermon is a part of Josif’s collection of sermons against witches, sorceresses and women’s vanity. There are only two extant seventeenth-century witnesses of the text, one attested in MS 1/154 from Odessa State Academic Library, and the other -- in MS No. 324 from the National Library in Sofia. This publication offers an edition of the text from the latter, with variant readings from the former, which was previously published by Mochulskij in 1903. The first part of the article presents a short account of the manuscripts which contain Josif’s collection designed for the spiritual improvement of women. The second and the third parts discuss the content and the language of the Sermon against Old Women’s Feasts. The article examines ‘orality’ imbedded in the text not only as a specificity of the author’s and the copyists’ linguistic choices vis-à-vis their audience, but also as a vehicle for preacher’s suggestive and critical interactions. The author used it as a way to include the voice of the dangerous Other while maintaining distance from it. Five main themes (namely, the true and false teachers; the spiritual blindness; the feasts; God’s punishment for sins; women-malefactors) are developed in the text at different levels and through different prisms. They are loosely connected through the repetition of a rhetorical question admonishing against pagan feasts and superstitions. While the author repeats these feasts in various combinations seven times in the text, in his representation of the local witches and their practices he resorts not to the oral tradition but to the written apocryphal sources, which stand closer to his own monastic and clerical milieu. The study offers the first ever systematic and detailed analysis of the language of the text, and concludes that it testifies to the consistent effort of the author and the copyists to follow the norms of the traditional written language by using well-known literary witnesses as a model while occasionally allowing vernacular usages. The copy in Odessa manuscript attests more vernacular elements on the level of morphosyntax, while the language of the copy in MS No. 324 from the National Library (Sofia) is more conservative.

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