Second Novi Breviary Facsimile Edition

The Second Novi Breviary is a manuscript of the prayers, readings, and chants for the Christian Divine Office, daily devotions celebrated by the professional religious. It was copied in 1493-1495 in Grobnik for the monastery and church of Saint Mary on Osap near Novi Vinodolski by a priest named Martinac and four assistants in Galgolitic script. Nearly complete, it is an essential witness to the blending of Greek and Latin traditions in the Croatian liturgy in Church Slavonic. Its illumination includes at least two miniatures.

The second Novi Breviary is a large codex of 500 folios. The greater part of it was transcribed by Priest Martinac from the district of Lapac in Grobnik, one of the free medieval Vinodol communes. In his colophons he mentions 1493, 1494 and 1495 as the years in which the codex was written and finished. It was inscribed for the Pauline monastery and the Church of St. Mary on Osap, a little hill outside the walls of Novi Vinodol. The Pauline monks in the glagolitic areas celebrated the Old Slav services from glagolitic liturgical books. The script, particularly that of Priest Martinac, is a neat and legible liturgical script in square Croatian glagolitic typical of the 14th and 15th centuries. As for its language, the codex is the Croatian redaction of Church Slav. The texts date from the 10th to the 15th centuries, merging old and new linguistic elements. Its breviary retains the entire breviary of the Roman Curia divided into lessons of considerable length and detailed descriptions of the offices in the rubrics.

1. Proprium de tempore (fol. 1-267d)

2. Calendar (fol. 268-275)

3. Psalterium (fol. 276a-322c)

4. Officium defunctorum (fol. 322c-324c)

5. Commune Sanctorum (fol. 324c-355c)

6. Officium "de Beata" (fol. 356a-359c)

7. Proprium sanctorum (fol. 382a-500d) 

All the components of this codex - language, script, illuminations, and text - are characterised by a mixture of older forms and newer innovations. They present a wide field of interest to scholars in linguistics and philology, and to librarians, liturgists, musicologists and art historians.