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Giorgio Ziffer
The Kievan Sermon on Law and Grace:
Between Textual Criticism and Hermeneutics
The Sermon on Law and Grace is one of the most celebrated literary works of Kievan literature and,
more generally, of the Church Slavic literature of Slavia Christiana. Written in the first half of the
11th century, it is traditionally attributed to Metropolitan Hilarion, the first Kievan metropolitan of
East Slavic origin.
Almost all scholarship devoted to this work has been limited to the study of only one textual
witness, namely, the famous Synodal manuscript n° 591 (preserved in the Moscow Historical
Museum), which is considered the sole representant of the first (or complete) redaction. In contrast
with the aforementioned critical tendency, it will be argued that the rest of the manuscript tradition,
which consists of no fewer than 54 mss., is of paramount importance for the history of the work’s
tradition as well as for the puzzles of textual criticism. Two main features of the manuscript tradition
will be discussed, i.e. contamination and interpolation; in addition a new stemmatic interpretation
for the Synodal manuscript will be proposed.
The second part of this talk will focus on (1) the question of the work’s composition—which in the
past several decades has often been defined as a cluster of originally separate and autonomous
textual units that were later put together, perhaps by the author himself—and (2) the question of the
work’s literary and spiritual meaning.