Acta Croatica is a collection of
Croatia
Croatia, officially the Republic of Croatia, is a country in Central Europe, Central and Southeast Europe, on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. It borders Slovenia to the northwest, Hungary to the northeast, Serbia to the east, Bosnia and Herze ...
n medieval public and private legal documents written in
Glagolitic
The Glagolitic script ( , , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed that it was created in the 9th century for the purpose of translating liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic by Saints Cyril and Methodi ...
, Cyrillic and Latin scripts, used for the study of Croatian medieval history and the history of the
Croatian language
Croatian (; ) is the standard language, standardised Variety (linguistics)#Standard varieties, variety of the Serbo-Croatian pluricentric language mainly used by Croats. It is the national official language and literary standard of Croatia, o ...
.
Description
The collection contains documents of Croatian medieval history from the beginning of 12th to the end of the fifteenth century. Its first edition was prepared by
Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski who published it in 1863 in the
JAZU series ''Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum meridionalium'' (Vol. 1). The new edition of ''Acta Croatica'' was prepared by
Đuro Šurmin who published it in 1898 in the Academy's series ''
Monumenta historico-juridica Slavorum meridionalium'' (from 1100 to 1499, Vol 6, book 1).
Despite the enormous contribution to the study of Croatian medieval history, both editions of ''Acta Croatica'' do not conform to accepted scientific standards of critical publications of medieval sources. For example, Kukuljević-Sakcinski arbitrarily transliterated Latin script documents to Glagolitic script for which he felt that their originals were written in Glagolitic. In Šurmin's edition, which sought to be the corrected and updated edition of Kukuljević-Sakcinski's ''Acta Croatica'', all of the Glagolitic and Latin script documents were printed in Cyrillic script.
Since both editions have a variety of diplomatic and linguistic errors, and readings are often unreliable and do not conform to modern principles of publishing critical editions of medieval documents, Yugoslav Academy decided to publish a new edition of ''Acta Croatica'' in accordance with critical palaeographic, linguistic, transliteration and diplomatic principles for publications of medieval sources. In 1917 this task was entrusted to the linguist
Stjepan Ivšić
Stjepan Ivšić (; 13 August 1884 – 14 January 1962) was a Croatian linguist, Slavicist, and accentologist.
Biography
Ivšić was born on 13 August 1884 in Orahovica. After finishing primary school in Orahovica, he attended secondary schoo ...
, who critically processed much of the material, which was also expanded with newly discovered documents to 1541. Since the early 1970s, Ivšić's work was continued by
Josip Bratulić and
Miroslav Kurelac. The first volume of Acta Croatica, edited by Bratulić, was published in 2017.
References
{{reflist
External links
Acta croatica 1863 edition, Google books
Medieval documents of Croatia
Latin words and phrases