Слово ради самовили от Женския сборник на Йосиф Брадати: контекст, реалии, език

The article studies the Sermon about Samovili from a collection of polemical and instructive
sermons against magic practices usually performed by women (thus known as Women’s collection).
It was compiled in the middle of the eighteenth century by a monk from Rila Monastery, Joseph
the Barbed. The Sermon is attested in all extant manuscripts containing this didactic collection. The
article, however, focuses on two copies: one from manuscript 1/154 kept in Odessa State Academic
Library, and the other from codex No 324 kept in SS Cyril and Methodius National Library in
Sofia. It briefly explores the context in which the collection appeared with still significant cases
of witch trials in Central and Eastern Europe. Further comparisons with contemporary cases from
the Russian and the Ottoman empires point at relations between the religious and secular powers
as a decisive element in handling the deviations from the religious norms. Looking at the closer,
parallel developments, the paper examines similarities between the Sermon about Samovili and
the treatise against magic by St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain – two texts written by monks
from larger Orthodox Christian monastic communities in the eighteenth-century Balkans under the
Ottoman rule. It establishes that alongside their common approach to the subject and an insight
into the reality of the eighteenth-century Balkans, they both used similar earlier sources, including a large portion from the biblical Books of Kings, transforming certain details from it to fit better their instructive purposes.
Among the types of magic and magic practitioners listed in the Sermon “samovili” present
a particular case, as in Bulgarian folk culture the name designates a fairy, a supernatural female
creature. Joseph the Barbed, however, demythologises it, turning it into a real human being, a
sorceress and an enchanter.
The paper offers the first systematic analysis of the linguistic specificities of the Sermon by
comparing and contrasting the language of the two above-mentioned copies. By contextualising
the two texts within a large pool of other contemporary written witnesses, the paper studies closely
the lexis, orthography and grammar of the text. The two copies attest to the linguistic hybridity
typical of the eighteenth century. However, the balance between the literary elements and the
elements of the spoken language differs in the two copies. The copyist of manuscript 1/154 from
Odessa State Academic Library felt freer to use more vernacular elements, as the literary norm at
the time allowed such an approach. Yet, certain linguistic features (such as the definite article and
renarrative mood) remained outside the sense of normativity. A number of literary elements had
close correspondences to the vernacular and did not obstruct the understanding of the Sermon. The
literary elements were sought to assert the authority of the preacher, fighting against superstition.