SREDNJOVJEKOVNI KORALNI KODEKSI BADIJSKE ZBIRKE SAMOSTANA MALE BRAĆE U DUBROVNIKU KAO SVJEDOCI UKINUTOG DOMINIKANSKOG SAMOSTANA U ZADRU.

In this paper the Dominican convent of Zadar has been established as a place where the medieval Dominican choir books from the Badija Collection of the friary of the Friars Minor in Dubrovnik had been used in liturgy. They consist of the two-volume gradual (Badija IV and Badija XII), which is given the main focus here, and the four-volume antiphoner (Badija III, Badija V, Badija X and Badija XI). As an analytical tool the so-called Basistext-Methode is applied (as used by Josef Leisibach and Felix Heinzer), which consists of comparing a liturgical manuscript to an already known manuscript of the presumed liturgical tradition, with the aim of determining deviations from the base text. Here, one of the copies of the codex exemplar of the medieval Dominican liturgy - Rome, Santa Sabina, XIV L1, copied between 1256 and 1259 - served as the base text. The examination included the litanies of all the saints and the sanctoral of both the gradual and the sequentiary. Zadar as the indisputable place of use of these choir books has been confirmed through analysis of the litanies in the gradual, which, together with customary local saints related to the Zadar ecclesiastical territory, also include the name of St. Plato the Martyr, the saint who was crucial for narrowing the provenance of the choir books to the Dominican convent in Zadar, abolished in 1807. The Zadar Dominicans moved into a Benedictine nun's convent with the adjoining church of St. Plato, whose titular continued to be venerated even after the expansion and rededication of the church in 1280, this time as Dominican, with St. Mark as its patron saint, and later St. Dominic. Of the liturgical chant manuscripts of the Dominican convent in Zadar, until now only a fourteenth-century missal in the Benedictine convent of St. Mary was known. Based solely on the liturgical content, one can conclude that the Badija choir books were created between 1256 and 1276, while on the basis of their illumination, Andrea Improta determined that they were produced between 1260 and 1280, probably in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, due to the similarities with the choir books illuminated by the Master of Bagnacavallo (in particular the antiphoner Bagnacavallo, Biblioteca Comunale Taroni, MSS. 1-3). This has also been corroborated by the paleographical analysis of the square chant notation which revealed the Badija choir books to be highly concordant with the five-volume antiphoner copied for the Dominicans of Imola around 1275 (Imola, Museo Diocesano, Corali 5, 6, 7, 9, 10). In an att empt to narrow the proposed time span, the dates connected to the early history of the Dominican church and convent of Zadar appear to be of crucial importance. Since the Dominican church in Zadar was solemnly dedicated in 1280, it seems justified to propose the thesis that the Badija choir books were the property of the new church that year at the latest and may have been specifically commissioned for its dedication. In that case, they could be dated to the 1270s, as much as two centuries earlier than heretofore believed, since Demović had dated them to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, while Badurina placed them at the end of the fourteenth century. These medieval choir books from the abolished convent in Zadar have thereby become the earliest known testimony to the Dominican chant tradition in Dalmatia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]