An Unknown Prayer of Akindynos in the 12th Century Russian Manuscript and an Attempt to Create the Russian “Minuscule”

The article is devoted to the unknown prayer to St. John Damascene preserved on the margins of the oldest Russian 12th century copy of the “Theology” by this Orthodox thinker. Its text is badly damaged and almost not readable. It has been visualized by the multispectral method with subsequent digital processing and published in this work. The text of the prayer was written in a unique type of ligature writing, which has only survived in one more codex. On the basis of codicological, paleographic and historical data, both texts have been dated to the last third of the 14th century and localized in Moscow. The article puts forward a hypothesis about the connection of the unusual ligature writing with the metropolitan scriptorium at the Moscow Chudov Monastery where there were Greek manuscripts at that time and new translations of liturgical texts were underway. Its appearance was probably due to the need of creating a new book letter design instead of the “ustav” (majuscule) in order to speed up the scribe’s work and save parchment. The original solution was inspired by the Greek ligature script and minuscule. However, this artificial style of writing did not spread out; the “ustav” was soon replaced by the “poluustav” letter form.