Студије о Душановом законику 2. Удвојени, раздељени и фрагментарни чланови Раковачког рукописа
Studies on Dušan’s Code Part 2 – Duplicated, Misplaced and Fragmentary Articles of the Rakovac Manuscript

Summary/Abstract: The Rakovac Manuscript is, without a doubt, one of the most important among the manuscripts of Dušan’s Code because of various characteristics. This papers analyzes the following: duplicated articles, fragmentary articles, wrong order of the articles in one part of the Manuscript and table of contents of the Code. Some articles from the original text of the Code are duplicated in the final part of the Manuscript. Those are (according to the standard numeration) the articles 13, 24, 76, 81, 108 and 143. Duplication of the above-mentioned articles is worthy of our greater attention because they are neither neighbouring nor grouped, so the clerical error of the scribe is not a possibility. Closer examination of these duplicates can not only show how they transferred the text and how much they can contribute to the overall reconstruction of the Code, but can also be a means to gain further insight into the structure of the Manuscript. The comparison of the duplicated and basic articles reveals the differences in the text that can only be explained by the use of different sources. Through the duplicated articles, as in a palimpsest, an unknown manuscript of the Code emerges from below. In the first part of the Code, between the articles 59 and 108, wrong order of the articles is clearly visible. Also, there is a fair number of incompletely preserved and fragmentary articles whose parts had been excerpted and transferred among other articles, losing their meaning in the process. That is the reason why the Rakovac Manuscript has more obscure places than any other copy in the manuscript tradition of Dušan’s Code. Misarrangements in the text are the result of the wrong order of paper sheets in one of the manuscripts that preceded the Rakovac Manuscript. Therefore, gathering the scattered parts of the articles helps their reconstruction, which, in most cases, has been successfully done by the publishers. Also, the comparison of pieces and fragments can allow insight in the copying scriptoria – not just in the work of the last copyist, but also of some of his predecessors. An ideal reconstruction of the order of the articles (before the paper sheets were placed in a wrong order) is given in Appendix II. As can be seen from that review, the standard numeration is wrong when it comes to the level of paper sheets of the source, but within individual sheets the order largely corresponds to the standard numeration. It must be borne in mind that the copyist must have put the mixed sheets together according to his scarce understanding of the content of the Code. Occasionally, it can be noticed that he looked for the places where the ending of one sheet corresponds to the beginning of the other. On the other hand, his erroneous reconstruction had great consequences on the numeration of the articles, which reflects (but also codifies) the wrong order of sheets.

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