Food and Axiology According to Two Texts in the 16th century Moldavian miscellany Ms.Slav. BAR 649

Abstract

The article focuses on two dietary calendars with pseudo-attribution to Tsar Solomon in the 16th-century Moldavian Tulcea Miscellanyfrom the Library of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. Their original text in Old Cyrillic is reproduced for the first time. The author sets the task to reveal the semantics of food prescriptions as a manifestation of the axiological criteria of the medieval man, influenced by medical, naturally scientific, predictive, daily knowledge and practices, as well as to trace the language peculiarities and functionality of the texts. An important issue is how the texts’ genre and themes fit into the mixed-content miscellanies of a type of monastic encyclopedias. Therefore, their genre specificity is discussed, with particular attention to the attitude towards food. This attitude appears to be an amalgam of ancient medical and medieval rational concepts, which, unlike other texts, are not guided by the norms of the Christian worship or fast. A hypothesis is made about the principles of the compilation in the miscellany and the role of the anthroponym Solomon as a linking element in different parts of it. The establishing of a local Moldavian type mixed-content miscellanies to which BAR649 belongs, allows to clarify how remarkable works of the Middle Bulgarian literature were kept and how the culture of miscellanies, typical for the Balkans in the 14th–15th centuries, was inherited and continued. DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2019.8.2.5