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Archangel Gospel of 1092
Inscribed 1997
What is it
A Cyrillic manuscript on calfskin parchment written
in 1092 of the four Gospels of the New Testament and
lectionary in codex or bound-book form.
Why was it inscribed
The Archangel Gospel presents valuable evidence of
the state and development of religion, philosophy and
culture in Europe and in European Russia at the end
of the 11th century.
Where is it
Russian State Library, Moscow, Russia
The existence of the Archangel Gospel was unknown to
the world until 1876 when it arrived in Moscow and was
there sold by its owner, a farmer from the Archangel or
Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia. Beyond these facts,
little is known of its origins and provenance although it has
been suggested that the book was a product of St George’s
(Yuriev) Monastery at Novgorod to the south of Archangel.
The manuscript itself contains the four books of the
Gospel together with a lectionary – a collected listing
of the specifi c readings appointed for worship on a
particular day. The colophon or publishing detail of the
manuscript records that two scribes wrote the main
parts, although there are shorter, inserted contributions
from two other scribes. The Gospel’s design is relatively
simple and its illustration minimal compared with better
known and more highly illustrated and illuminated
medieval manuscripts. The relative plainness of the book’s
appearance perhaps suggests that the copy was intended
for everyday use rather than for presentation as a gift to
a patron.
Rare and attractive as the Gospel is, its particular value
lies in what it reveals about the time and culture from
which it came. In 1054 the Great Schism divided the
Christian Church along diff ering theological lines into
Eastern Greek and Western Latin wings and the Archangel
Gospel is a product of the aftermath of the split.
The Gospel is written in Cyrillic rather than Latin, and as
such it is one of the oldest existing Eastern Slavic books
in the world. The Cyrillic alphabet was a form that had
developed in Russia as recently as the 10th century, so
the transcription of the Slavonic language of the Church
into Cyrillic makes the book highly valuable for scholars
of linguistics. In addition, the handwriting in the
manuscript is invaluable to paleographers.
The Gospel is also signifi cant in that it is a codex and is
bound in the form of printed books of today. The practice
of presenting information in book rather than in scroll
form is generally thought to derive from the spread
of Christianity, which early adopted the codex form for
the Bible. Scrolls continued to be used in Far Eastern
culture beyond the end of their use in the West.
Archangel Gospel of 1092
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