The benchmark work for text editions on the early history of the Slavic peoples was August Schlözer’s edition of the Nestor Chronicle, an early-12th-century history of Kievan Rus’ (5 vols, 1802-09). In the following years, philological interest in the earliest written traces of the Slavic nations grew, and important MSS and texts were brought to light and edited. Josef Dobrovský edited an 11th-century Latin-language legend from Moravia on the mission of SS Cyril and Methodius, Tempore Michaeli Imperatoris (1826); the edition appeared during the rediscovery of the saints’ Pan-Slavic and philological importance as codifiers of the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language and of the Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. Accordingly, most ancient Slavic manuscripts were liturgical or biblical, and many of them were discovered and/or edited by Jernej Kopitar.
The liturgical and hagiographical 10th-century Codex suprasliensis (named after the place of its 1823 discovery, the Basilian monastery of Supraśl), was dispersed in the course of the less than harmonious collaboration between Kopitar (who transcribed it) and the Slavicist Michal Bobrowski (who had discovered it); an edition was made by Franc Miklošič in 1858. Kopitar himself made an edition of the 10th-century Freising MS (named after the monastery near Munich, from where it had been transferred to the Munich court library during the secularizations of 1803, to be discovered there in 1807). Kopitar claimed that these manuscripts represented the oldest text in the Slovene language and hence supported his theory that Slovene was one of the oldest Slavic literary languages. Kopitar also edited an 11th-century Macedonian manuscript in 1836, containing homilies of St John Chrysostom and others. Named after its alphabet and its last private owner, Count Cloz, it is known as the Glagolita Cluzianus; following Kopitar’s 1836 edition, Miklošič, who discovered another 2 leaves, published another one in 1860.
In 1830, the Reims Gospel, a medieval Gospel/pericope text which from the 16th century on had been kept in Reims Cathedral (from where it had gone astray during the French Revolution), was brought to light in the Reims municipal library following enquiries from Kopitar; Václav Hanka published an edition in 1846.
A 12th-century Glagolitic Croatian law text, the Vinodol Statute, was edited by Antun Mazuranić in 1843 and again, in a Russian version, by Osyp Bodjans’kyj, in 1843 (a book edition followed in 1846). A Polish edition was made in 1856 by Wacław Maciejowski. It was included in Vatroslav Jagić’s Glagolitica of 1890, which also contained portions of the 11th-century Kiev Missal, of which leaves had been coming to light in the preceding decades (first signalled in 1874 by Izmail Sreznevskij). Two other Old Church Slavonic MSS were found on Mount Athos: Codex Marianus (transferred to Russia in 1844; fragments edited by Miklošič in 1850) and Codex Zographensis (transferred to Russia in 1860; fragments edited by Sreznevskij in 1856). Both were more fully edited by Jagić in 1879.
As the names of the various editors indicate, these editions involved collaboration and competition between Slavicists in many countries, testifying to the general importance attached to them in all Slavic communities.
The oldest history and settlements of the Slavic nations in Europe had been elucidated by the antiquarian work of Pavol Josef Šafárik, who drew on the discoveries and editions of these years. Šafárik’s early Geschichte der slawischen Sprache und Literatur nach allen Mundarten (1826) echoed, in its title, scope and phylogenetic “family tree” model of languages and nations, Radlof’s Germanically-oriented Die Sprache der Germanen in allen Mundarten (1817). His Slovanské starožitnosti (“Slavic antiquities”) summarized material from earlier sources and chronicles into a settlement history of the Slavic cultural communities in Europe. It was expanded in 1842 by an ethnic survey (Slovanski narodopis) with an accompanying large-scale map and had a strong motivating effect on Pan-Slavic thought everywhere.
