Unresearched Areas in Interpreting Byzantine Semiography

Although the manuscripts belonging to the Putna school have been the object of a variety of attentive research world-wide, they still contain highly challenging areas left almost untouched until today. Evstatie the Protopsaltes appears as the last writer of his time to use in his cryptographic liturgical texts an encryption procedure that had been known in 14^th century Europe as keyed writing, best exemplified, among others, by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. By its very dimension and complexity the cryptographic procedures used in his 1511 Antologion are of the most remarkable if not entirely unique in medieval European literature: 87 cryptograms, with 108 combinations in 7 alphabets. An unusual type of cryptic writing is well exemplified in Evstatie's 1515 manuscript by the numerous anagrams used especially in papadic and melismatic chants, normally sung "in extenso" at vespers, and referring to the structure of the poetic text used. Besides those the ideograms, exemplified in the Sofia Antologion, and the repetition signs, invented by Evstatie himself, combine with special other signs such as those used to mark the cadences to offer a truly rich and unexpectedly challenging picture of Putnean semiography. These unusual semiographic aspects also contribute to a large extent in transforming each particular manuscript into a highly specific work, bearing the marked personality imprinted by its author.

Titus Moisescu