Book Presentation: The Medieval Ragusan Slavic Chancery
In the St. Blaise Hall of the Sponza Palace, a presentation was held for the book The Medieval Ragusan Slavic Chancery: The Dynamics of Script in Cyrillic Documents of the Dubrovnik Archive, authored by Dr. Kristian Paskojević, research associate at the Old Church Slavonic Institute in Zagreb. The work was published jointly by the Old Church Slavonic Institute and the Croatian University Press.
Alongside the author, the speakers included Dr. Igor Medić, assistant to the acting principal of the Old Church Slavonic Institute, reviewer Dr. Ivan Botica, also from the Old Church Slavonic Institute, and Anita Šikić on behalf of the Croatian University Press. The program was opened on behalf of the host institution by the principal of the State Archives in Dubrovnik, Nikolina Pozniak, who expressed her satisfaction that the Archive could support such significant scholarly research and publications.
This book is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation The Developmental Process of Diplomatic Cyrillic Minuscule in the Documents of the Medieval Ragusan Chancery, defended in 2018 under the mentorship of Academician Mateo Žagar within the Postgraduate Medieval Studies Program at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. In it, the author examines the development of a specific script—diplomatic Cyrillic minuscule—through a representative corpus of charters and documents, a script primarily used for political, legal, and commercial purposes. Chronologically, the corpus spans the period from the late 12th to the late 15th century, while methodologically, the palaeographic analysis is conceived through a grapholinguistic approach, which views writing as an unfinished process that constantly changes and evolves.
