Between Southern Italy and Dalmatia Missal MR 166 of the Metropolitana Library, Zagreb

Abstract

The Missal MR 166 from the Metropolitana Library, Zagreb, written in Beneventana script and dating back to the twelfth-thirteenth centuries, has long been considered a Dalmatian product, similar to the coeval illuminated manuscript in Beneventana script preserved in the Trogir Cathedral and originating in Zadar. Nevertheless, later studies - specifically based on the textual features of the manuscript - showed that it is undoubtedly a Southern Italian product, and a significant testimony of the uninterrupted book circulation that existed on both sides of the Adriatic for three centuries roughly from the eleventh to the thirteenth, thus influencing the activity of the Benedictine scriptoria on the Dalmatian coast. On the basis of the study that makes it possible to define more closely the group of manuscripts that make up the 'corpus of the illuminated manuscripts from Dalmatia', the paper aims to support the Southern Italian origin of the Missal by means of a critical analysis of the theories put forward so far about the 'typically Dalmatian' features of its Initialornamentik.