Armenian Polyglot Prayerbook
NERSES IV the Gracious, Saint. Preces Sancti Nierses. Armeniorum Patriarchae. Turcice, Graece, Latine, Italice, et Gallice redditae. Venice: San Lazzaro degli Armeni. 1815.
Contemporary pink paste-paper boards, patterned yellow endpapers with a design of holly leaves and dots, borders roll-tooled in gilt, green silk pencil holder to rear board, pink silk place-marker; pp. 172, [2 (appendix, blank)]; engraved portrait of Nerses IV to p. 7; paste-paper split at upper joint, corners and extremities bumped with small loss to paper at head of spine; City of Cardiff Reference Library bookplate to front pastedown and endpaper with red ink deaccession stamp, old bibliographical note on verso of City of Cardiff Public reader’s ticket pasted to front flyleaf.
Scarce third edition (first 1810), significantly expanded, of the cycle of twenty-four prayers by the theologian, poet, and composer St Nerses the Gracious (1102–1173), Catholicos of the Armenian Church, translated into fourteen languages and printed at the Armenian Catholic monastery on the Venetian island of St Lazarus.
The Venetian islet of San Lazzaro degli Armeni was granted to the Armenian Catholic monk Mkhitar Sebastatsi in 1717, who established a Mekhitarist monastery there, the primary centre of the order. This series of prayers by Nerses IV (also called Nerses of Kla, Nerses Shnorhali, or Nerses the Graceful), known as ‘I confess with faith’ (Havadov Khosdovanim), contains one prayer for each hour of the day, with an emphasis on repentance, pleas for protection, and adoration of the Holy Trinity.
The first edition featured eight languages and was expanded in 1811, and again in the present edition, including twenty-four languages by 1837 and thirty-three languages by 1862.
Although the title-page lists only Turkish (here rendered using the Armeno-Turkish alphabet), Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, this edition also contains Armenian; the Transylvanian Armenian dialect known as Artial or Ardeal, now functionally extinct; English; German; Hungarian; Serbian; Dutch; Spanish; and Illyrian.
OCLC finds five copies in the US (BPL, Harvard, NYPL, Princeton Theological Seminary, Wesleyan) and two in the UK (BL, Edinburgh), to which Library Hub adds copies at the Bodleian, Lambeth Palace, and Eton.
Davt’yan 227. See Brunet IV, col. 859 (calling for editions from 1818 onward); Nersessian 510 (1837 edition only).
SKU: 2125782