The period of transition between the tenth and the eleventh centuries is supposed to be the beginning of the so-called Golden Age - a new era in old Georgian literature. This was the starting point of an orientation of Georgian intellectuals towards Byzantine culture which was determined, on the one hand by the political course of Georgia towards Constantinople, and on the other by the cultural and educational rise of Byzantium which inspired the literary activities of Georgian scholars working in monastic centres outside Georgia. The process of the growth of Byzantine influence on Georgian literature began in the monastic centre of Mt. Athos in the end of the 10th century and continued in the monastic centres of the Black Mountain (in the region of Antioch); the final result of these processes was the founding of a medieval educational centre in West Georgia – the Academy of Gelaty in the 12th century. The aim of Georgian scholars of this period was to bring Georgian literature into line with the Byzantine norm, to enrich the Georgian literary tradition with translations of Byzantine writings of different genres. At the end of the 11th century in the Antiochene literary school a new hellenophile tendency – a method of making literal (verbum e verbo) translations was also founded. The aim of the paper is to show how these processes influenced development of the 11th-13th centuries medieval Georgian manuscript. Employing an analysis of the composition of the 11th-13th centuries Georgian manuscripts, as well as information concerning the peculiarities of Georgian manuscripts preserved in the prefaces and colophons of Georgian scholars, an attempt is made to reconstruct a picture of the medieval book culture in the Georgian literary tradition taking into consideration the features of the Georgian literary schools where these manuscripts were produced.
Thamar Otkhmezuri is the Head of the Department of Codicology and Textology, National Centre of Manuscripts, Tbilisi, Georgia. Her work focuses on the study of the problems of Georgian-Byzantine literary relations, Old Georgian translation tradition, the publication of Old Georgian ecclesiastic texts, namely, translations of the 11th-13th centuries. She participated in the international project: The Critical Edition of the Works of Gregory of Nazianzus (Institut Orientaliste, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 1990-2005). Among her monographs are: Pseudo-Nonniani in IV orationes Gregorii Nazianzeni commentarii. Versio iberica (Corpus Christianorum. Series Graeca, 50. Corpus Nazianzenum, 16), Turnhout - Leuven, 2002; The Commentarial Genre in the Medieval Georgian Translation Tradition, Ilia State University Press, Tbilisi, 2011. She is currently working on the descriptive catalogue of Greek manuscripts preserved at the National Centre of Manuscripts in Tbilisi.