Merge pull request #31 from eeditiones/tuurma-rrss-1

blog post about RRSS from Matija Ogrin

posts/register-slovenian-manuscripts.md

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+---
+title: "Register of Older Slovenian Manuscripts"
+short: "Register of Older Slovenian Manuscripts"
+lead: "Re-edition of 17th and 18th century Slovenian manuscripts - a phenomenon of the Slovenian manuscript culture of the Baroque period
+and its long-lived extensions into the 19th century"
+date: 2024-10-15
+author: Matija Ogrin
+tags:
+  - projects
+coverImage: banner_rrss_Slo.png
+#coverImageCredits: 
+
+---
+
+Slovenian literature in the long period between the Reformation in the 16th century and
+Romanticism in the 19th century appears in a new light when viewed through manuscripts. As in
+the case of other literatures, we have known Slovenian literature of the modern period only
+through the prism of printed books. Manuscripts have been neglected by older literary scholars.
+As a result, many Slovenian manuscripts from previous centuries are completely unknown.
+
+That's why at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, we have
+created the [Register of Older Slovenian Manuscripts](https://rrss.manuscripta.zrc-sazu.si), using TEI Publisher to display our TEI
+encoded data. Each <msDesc> description combines four separate blocks of data according to the
+guidelines: identifier, manuscript content, codicological description and manuscript history.
+
+This is a small but long-term project begun in 2011 that we are working on here and there, but
+it is an important support for other research. So far we have described 200 manuscripts in the
+register, for a half of them, digital images are provided (14.000 pages).
+
+Most of the manuscripts are anonymous, but it has almost always been possible to determine
+whether a manuscript was written in a monastery, or by a diocesan priest, or in a bourgeois
+environment, or among peasants in a village, or by a churchwarden, or a schoolteacher, etc. We
+have therefore created a typology of these social contexts in which the manuscripts came into
+existence, and labelled our <msDesc> according to this typology. The TEI Publisher has shown
+excellent agility and speed in this and similar requests.
+
+Our manuscript descriptions and digital facsimiles reveal a hitherto unknown reality: from the
+17th to the 19th century, many texts were produced in Slovenian which, for economic and
+ideological reasons, could not be printed but were circulated only in transcript form. This has led
+to the discovery of a new phenomenon: the Slovenian manuscript culture of the Baroque period
+and its long-lived extensions into the 19th century.
+
+If the printed book was the fundamental form of existence of Slovenian literature in the 16th
+century (or print coexisted with manuscripts, but the manuscripts perished), then in the 17th and
+18th centuries it was the other way round: for a long time the manuscript was the fundamental
+form of existence of Slovenian literature, the book sometimes accompanied the manuscript,
+sometimes not. Our Register faithfully records the complicated relationships between printed
+books, which were no longer available in later times, and manuscripts, which restored and
+transmitted the texts of these inaccessible books.
+
+Manuscript culture made writing and reading possible for both peasant writers and educated
+writers in the cities and in monasteries. It adapted flexibly to Slovenian dialects and to the wishes
+of people in small communities, which is why manuscript copying persisted stubbornly even into
+the 19th century.