Our Notes & References

Early production of the Propaganda Fide, and one of its only four Slavic books in Cyrillic script printed in the 17th century.

Very rare, with only one example at auction (20 years ago) and four in libraries according to WorldCat, none in the USA (BL, BnF, Dresden, and Royal Danish Library).

Originally printed in Naples in 1564 as a confessional manual in the Italian vernacular, the Confessionario of the Dominican monk Girolamo da Palermo (d. 1595) aimed to provide Catholic penitents with a detailed guide to making an accurate examination of their conscience and an effective confession of their sins. The Confessionario met with sustained success, being printed without interruption across Italy until the late seventeenth century, for a total of over a hundred distinct editions (cf. Borraccini).

In 1630, persuaded of its usefulness for the evangelisation of the towns of the eastern Adriatic, the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide sponsored translation of the work into Slavic (or as the title page states, ‘Bosnian’) — this volume is one of only four Slavic books printed by the Fide in Cyrillic, the rest having been in Glagolitic or Latin (cf. Ambrosiani). ʻSlavic’ describes here an intermediate stage between Central South Slavonic, Russian Church Slavonic and East Slavic dialects, whose spellings and grammatical features were more closely aligned in the 17th century than in the present day (see Ambrosiani). Interestingly, all four records in WorldCat disagree on the language from ‘Kirkeslavisk’ (Church Slavonic) to Serbian to Bosnian.

Remondini republished this Slavic Confessionario in Vicenza and Bassano once again in 1670, and the printer Giuseppe Longhi re-edited it in Bologna in 1679.

The theme of confession and sin was a popular one to which the Fide returned regularly: see for example the 1636 Ispravnik za erei, a guide to confession for priests in Croatian Glagolitic (which we have handled too). This is perhaps because the Slavs had had their own distinct Rite of Confession since the time of Cyril and Methodius: unlike the Catholics, the Orthodox do not consider penance an integral part of confession, and do not recognise the mortal/venial sin divide (Zernov).

We find the book’s subtitle somewhat confusing or misleading, indicating that the text has been ‘sabran iz pravoslavnijekh nauchitelia’ [collected from the orthodox teacher] — would the Propaganda Fide be playing with lower-case and upper-case ‘Orthodoxy’ to make Catholicism more palatable to the prospective convert? In fact, of course, the text espouses only the most Catholic of teachings.

Bibliography

Ambrosiani, Per. 2019. ‘Slavic Alphabets and Languages in Publications by the Propaganda Fide during the 17th and 18th Centuries’. In Bamberger Beiträge Zur Linguistik, edited by Sebastian Kempgen and Vittorio S. Tomelleri, vol. 19. University of Bamberg Press; Borraccini, Rosa Marisa. 2016. ‘An Unknown Best-Seller: The Confessionario of Girolamo Da Palermo’. In Lost Books. Reconstructing the Print World of Pre-Industrial Europe. Brill; Zernov, Nicolas. 1940. ‘The Sacrament of Confession in the Eastern Orthodox Church’. Theology 40 (237): 203–9.