Staročeské sumáře v biblích 15. století
Old Czech Summaries in Fifteenth-Century Bibles

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on some non-biblical texts accompanying Old Czech Bible translations in the Middle Ages. The oldest translation of the entire Bible into Old Czech, which comes from the 1350s, included a particular type of non-biblical texts: prefaces to biblical books. The following Old Czech revisions and new translations of the Bible were provided, to varying degrees, with other textual aids, such as the lists of Mass readings. In this paper, we focus on the so-called capitula, summaries of individual chapters of particular biblical books. In the Middle Ages, the capitula were an aid providing orientation in the text for the study of the Holy Writ in Latin. During the revision of the Czech biblical translation at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, chapter summaries in Latin were also translated. However, they are only preserved in their entirety in one manuscript, the second volume of the Litoměřice-Třeboň Bible. Other Old Czech Bibles included biblical summaries only exceptionally and selectively; the Old Czech chapter summaries survived in nine biblical manuscripts, mainly before individual chapters of selected books of the Old Testament. They were primarily intended to familiarise readers with the content of the text. The biblical summaries deserve a critical edition and further research, especially for their Old Czech vocabulary, reflecting the formation of biblical language and style in the late Middle Ages.

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