Da Evangeliario di San Pietroburgo a Evangeliario di Sibiu. Tra scoperte e riscoperte.

Many if not all the pivotal issues about the Slavonic-Romanian Gospel Book discovered at St. Petersburg in 1858 are still open, to a greater or a lesser extent. The aim of this study is to offer an up-to-date critical survey about the Saint Petersburg Gospel Book from its discovery in 1858 to the latest critical contributions, through its re-discovery as Sibiu Gospel Book in 1965. There is no such an historical survey in Italian so far, whilst the most recent ones in French and Rumanian date back to 1973 and 1985, respectively. Being bilingual, printed in Church Slavonic and Rumanian, this alleged fragment of the Four Gospels may represent the last monument of the Rumanian Slavonism and the first surviving monument of the Rumanian literature as well. The gradual rediscovery of the fragment, yet to be completed today, has been summarized here by surveying 88 studies and reviews, 24 of which are monographs, 64 containing just relevant references to the bilingual text. For the first time, the latest critical contributions conerning the Gospel Book (all the monographs of the last 19 years, from 1985 to 2012) have been discussed both retrospectively and prospectively. Two critical issues are expected to be the starting point for future research about the text: its linguistic (and cultural) duality; the text or more likely the texts from which it was translated into Rumanian, that is to say the “Eastern” and “Western” influences forming its historical background in the late Rumanian Middle-Ages.