Bucvarul mitropolitului Iacov Putneanul
Metropolitan Jacob’s Primer

Summary/Abstract: Jacob of Putna, Metropolitan of Moldavia between 1750 and 1760, loved school, the best proof of this being the publication of the Primer at Iaşi in 1755. It is the first school manual in Romanian to be published in Moldavia. The book, meant for pupils in the primary school, comprises, besides the Foreword of Metropolitan Jacob himself, the Cyrillic alphabet (together with diacritics and punctuation, the most common abbreviations etc.) and a group of formative texts: the main prayers of the day, the ten commandments etc., as well as the Paraklesis to the Most Holy Mother of God and the Synaxarion for the whole year. Besides the 1755 edition (with only one extant copy, which lacks more than half of the folios), the text was published a second time, most probably between 1755 and 1760, with some small changes from the first edition (the copy we discovered in the deposits of the Library of the Romanian Academy is in a much better conservation state) and again, in 1771 at Vienna for the Romanian Orthodox people in the Habsburg Empire. The third edition, from 1771, copies the second exactly. This article is followed by the transliteration into Latin characters of the Cyrillic text of the second edition of the Primer, following the above mentioned newly discovered copy.

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