The Passion Play of Kapla (today Železna Kapla/Eisenkappel) is one of the major discoveries in the research of early modern Slovenian literature. The critical edition presents the text of the manuscript, that was written at the end of the 18th century, but contains an older transmission of the drama from the 17th century. By means of codicological analysis, several rearrangements of quires and ms. folia (and related textual arrangements) were discovered. The editors of the edition proved that in the year of 1800, the passion play has still been performed and that shortly beforehand, the manuscript was composed in the process of a partial textual adaptation where the writer from Železna Kapla/Eisenkappel disposed of at least two manuscript witnesses of the old Baroque play. As the historical evidence demonstrates, the textual transmission could only come from the lost Slovenian Jesuit drama of the 17th century, which is attested for the village of Dobra vas/Eberendorf in 1615. Thus, the critical edition opens a new insight into the very beginnings of the Slovenian drama and theater. The edition was published in a printed book (546 pp.) and simultaneously in a digital publication which offers complete materials, from digital facsimile to diplomatic transcription, critical text, commentary, and the concordances of the lemmatized diplomatic text. Available in open access: (http://nl.ijs.si/e-zrc/kapelski/).
COBISS.SI-ID: 287127552
This monograph is the first fundamental study of that genre of administrative Slovenica documents, where the Slovenian language penetrated very late instead of German. In studies of older Slovenian documents, testaments are hardly present, which becomes particularly evident when compared with juridical oaths, which are by far the most numerous Slovenian official texts. In his research, Golec discovered a number of new documents in Slovenian. From a total of 42 wills covered by the monograph, the majority (29) it published here for the first time. Nine oaths, related to the last wills, are added to form a more complete image of the historical micro-situation. Slovenian testaments reflect the diverse social structure from serfs to nobles, they belong also, one for each of them, to a bourgeois, a teacher, a priest and a soldier. Quite representative is also the distribution of the Slovenian regions from Istria and Trieste to Prlekija.
COBISS.SI-ID: 41237805
The chapter is published in a volume by the Sweden academy “Royal Skyttean Society” and aims to present some 18th century manuscript material, related to the cultural interests of the unlearned, peasant writers or readers. Until recently, numerous Slovenian manuscripts from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have remained unknown. Many of them were written by Slovenian peasant writers or by rural clergymen and intended for peasant readers. These manuscripts represent a current of traditional folk culture that was abolished or suppressed by the authorities of enlightened absolutism in the Habsburg Monarchy. In this context, manuscript culture served as a medium in which Slovenian vernacular literature could exist and survive against the enlightened and rationalistic dominant culture. Based on the examples of three representative manuscripts (a songbook, a translation and adaptation of ascetic prose by Martin of Cochem and a passion play from Eisenkappel/Železna Kapla), this article outlines how manuscript culture allowed writers to adapt and reshape texts in order to meet the interests of their local community and to reaffirm their traditional identity.
COBISS.SI-ID: 40603949
The article elucidates the long historical background of the content and literary structure of the heretofore unknown manuscript, which was written in the Slovenian language in the 18th century and discovered in 2009 in the Poljanska Dolina (Valley) near Škofja Loka. It was named the Poljanski Manuscript for the location of its discovery. Dr. France Štukel and Dr. Boris Golec made sure the manuscript ended up in the collection of the Narodna in Univerzitetna Knjižnica (NUK, the National and University Library, code NRSS 037); Dr. Matija Ogrin entered it in the first digital register of unknown manuscripts of Slovenian literature from the 17th and 18th century, which he had prepared under the auspices of the Inštitut za slovensko literaturo in literarne vede (Institute for Slovenian Literature and Literary Sciences) of the Znanstvenoraziskovalni center (ZRC, Center for Scientific Research) of the Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti (SAZU, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts). The late baroque manuscript was crafted in a large format (folio) in 1799 or soon thereafter; its more than 700 pages describe the life of Jesus in hundred »postavas« or chapters. The text belongs to the genre of ascetic literature and meditations from the tradition of Vita Christi that began with multiple explanations and commentaries by the Church Fathers and continued through the Middle Ages, when numerous »spiritual revolutionaries« from religious communities enriched it with purely human conceptions of the life of Jesus in relation with other personalities and events that are given in the Gospel accounts. Many manuscripts of this type were written on the basis of the four Gospels in religious and secular milieu in Medieval Europe. Manuscripts of this type were created out of conviction that the message of the Gospels should be brought closer to the people by appealing to natural human feelings. The article aims to present the content and literary particularities of the Poljanski manuscript on the basis of the material that highlights the development of biblical hermeneutics from antiquity to baroque.
COBISS.SI-ID: 41208877
We propose a language-independent word normalisation method and exemplify it on modernising historical Slovene words. Our method relies on character-level statistical machine translation (CSMT) and uses only shallow knowledge. We present relevant data on historical Slovene, consisting of two (partially) manually annotated corpora and the lexicons derived from these corpora, containing historical word–modern word pairs. The two lexicons are disjoint, with one serving as the training set containing 40,000 entries, and the other as a test set with 20,000 entries. The data spans the years 1750–1900, and the lexicons are split into fifty-year slices, with all the experiments carried out separately on the three time periods. We perform two sets of experiments. In the first one – a supervised setting – we build a CSMT system using the lexicon of word pairs as training data. In the second one – an unsupervised setting – we simulate a scenario in which word pairs are not available. We propose a two-step method where we first extract a noisy list of word pairs by matching historical words with cognate modern words, and then train a CSMT system on these pairs. In both sets of experiments, we also optionally make use of a lexicon of modern words to filter the modernisation hypotheses. While we show that both methods produce significantly better results than the baselines, their accuracy and which method works best strongly correlates with the age of the texts, meaning that the choice of the best method will depend on the properties of the historical language which is to be modernised. As an extrinsic evaluation, we also compare the quality of part-of-speech tagging and lemmatisation directly on historical text and on its modernised words. We show that, depending on the age of the text, annotation on modernised words also produces significantly better results than annotation on the original text.
COBISS.SI-ID: 28767015