The Brno Manuscript of The Chronicle of Cosmas of Prague

For the first time, a digital copy of the Brno manuscript of The Chronicle of Cosmas of Prague, preserved in the Brno City Archives under the shelfmark A 101, has been made available online in Manuscriptorium. We warmly thank the local staff for providing the photographs, especially the Director Libor Blažek and Dr. Radana Červená!

The Brno manuscript represents a peculiar version of Cosmas’s work: although it contains all three books of the chronicle, many passages appear in a highly abbreviated form. For this reason – and due to its close textual relationship with the Bautzen manuscript – the respected medievalist Rostislav Nový proposed a bold, though not widely accepted, hypothesis that the Brno manuscript might be the only surviving remnant of an earlier, shorter redaction of Cosmas’s chronicle. Based on the manuscript’s content, it can be inferred that it was written around the mid-15th century in the Benedictine monastery at Třebíč, or perhaps slightly earlier at its priory in Komárov (now part of Brno). The text of The Chronicle includes a unique interpolation about the founding of the Třebíč convent, along with a transcription of its alleged foundation charter, which, however, is a forgery from the turn of the 13th century (fol. 234rb–vb). Following Cosmas’s chronicle (ff. 194vb–239ra), the same scribe added the second redaction of Pulkava’s chronicle (ff. 239rb–284va); the first part of the manuscript, written by another scribe, contains a sequence of historical texts on Roman history.

Literatura

• Irena ZACHOVÁ – Stanislav PETR, Soupis sbírky rukopisů Antonína Bedřicha Mitrovského v Archivu města Brna [Catalogue of the Manuscript Collection of Antonín Bedřich Mitrovský in the Brno City Archives], Praha – Brno 1999 (Studie o rukopisech. Monographia 4), pp. 95–99, no. 176
• Rostislav NOVÝ, Dvojí redakce Kosmovy kroniky Čechů [Two Redactions of Cosmas’s Chronicle of the Czechs], Acta Universitatis Carolinae – Philosophica et historica 2/1981. Studia historica 21, pp. 93–123
• Bertold BRETHOLZ, Studien zu Cosmas von Prag II., Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde 35, 1910, pp. 677–704, here pp. 692–704

Other medieval manuscripts from the Brno City Archives can be found here.