Maya Petrova-Taneva (Bălgarska akademija na naukite, Institut za literatura, Sofia)
The Bdinski Sbornik (Ghent University library, cod. 408) is the only Slavic manuscript kept in Belgian archives. Its significance as a representative of the medieval South Slavic literary traditions is partly due to the fact that it belongs to a very rare genre – the so-called Meterika collections. These are books containing exclusively women saints’ Lives and sayings of holy women excerpted from the Reading Menaia and various monastic miscellanies (such as John Moschos’ Spiritual Meadow, the Lausiac History of Palladios, etc.). In this form the Meterika collections are designed as a female counterpart to the Paterika or “Books About the Holy Fathers” and were often commissioned or possessed by private women or by female religious convents. As such the Meterika of exemplary stories could be examined as a unique source for elucidating the models of pious behaviour proposed to the Orthodox nuns and noble women, at the same time providing them with a wide range of interesting and exciting readings.
This study deals with a number of little-known Greek and Slavic (Bulgarian, Serbian and Russian) Meterika dating from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries and tries to situate the Bdinski Sbornik among them.