Evidence of Christian humanism in the biblical texts of Gjon Buzuku's 'Missal' (III) - Reference models for Gjon Buzuku's 'Missal'
This contribution is the last in our triad of studies on the intellectual and theological formation of Gjon Buzuku, as the author of the first book in the Albanian language known to us to date (Demiraj 2023a/2024; 2026a). As bold as this objective may seem - especially considering the lack of any documentation on the author and his work - it has nonetheless taken shape thanks to the effectiveness of the results obtained through the application of a new comparative method, developed by the author, applied to approximately 70+10 pericopes from the New and Old Testaments. The classification of the results from these three studies now makes it possible, within philological discourse, to offer positive - that is convincing - alternative solutions; particularly regarding the intellectual and theological formation of the author, who, according to our already strengthened conviction, aligned himself with Christian Humanism as a progressive and moderated current within the intellectual and theological milieu of the first half of the 16th century. This research method subsequently led to the successful identification of the original textual models from other languages that Gjon Buzuku referred in structuring the second part of his 'Missal'.
Observations on the restored copy of Don Gjon Buzuku's 'Missal' - II. The fragments at the end of the text
This study is the second in our triptych of studies on the restored book of Don Gjon Buzuku's 'Missal' as a typographical product. Here we have focused on examining the fragments of four paper scraps that conclude the only copy of the first book published in the Albanian language, as it is known today. The liturgical material contained in them is so poorly preserved that it is difficult to treat them in the same way as the rest of the main corpus with running text (§1). Nevertheless, as parts of the whole book, they deserve to be included in the comprehensive study of the 'Missal'. Therefore, within the limits of the available evidence, we have tried, in addition to the tabular presentation of the material in question, to convey to the reader various alternative solutions concerning the study of these fragments in themselves (§2), as well as in their entirety and
The Slavic Linguistic-Cultural Influence on Gjon Buzuku's ‘Missal’
– a Scientific-Philological Narrative
Conceived as a continuation of several contributions to a project in progress by the author on the ‘Missale’ by Johannes Buzuku (1555) and its position in ancient Albanian writing culture, this article aims to examine the potential influence of liturgical texts in the ancient Croatian vernacular in the 15th and 16th centuries (§1). This influence has been repeatedly noted in philological and linguistic discourse in many respects: a) graphemically, since several graphemes in Buzuku’s alphabet appear to be taken from the Cyrillic script; b) linguistically and stylistically, as the text of ‘Missale’ presumably contains vernacular Slavic influences; and c) structurally, especially in the second part of the text, which resembles a pericope book, shows clear similarities with the Old Croatian lectionaries in Latin script (in the 15th-16th centuries). Apart from the question of five graphemes with partly ambiguous values in the Buzuku’s alphabet, including: [v] ‘vjed’, [u, y] ‘uk’, [ɉ, c, g] ‘đerv’, [ð, θ] ‘ksi cyrillique’, [z] ‘zemlja’ (§2), which unambiguously originate from the Cyrillic alphabet (the Bosančica variant) and still require thorough investigation, the author sees no reason to perceive linguistic influence from the Old Croatian liturgy and its written culture (§3). The third question has been subjected to a thorough analysis in an intertextual comparison between Buzuku’s ‘Missale’ and two Old Croatian lectionaries (14941, 15432 and 1508), and the result clearly indicates that there is no Slavic influence in terms of style and text structure either (§§4-6).