The Venetian Schiavoni and the 1498 Historical-Liturgical Booklet in the Honor of St Jerome the Illyrian

Sa？etak Although he had long been revered as the apostle of the Croats in Glagolite circles of the Croatian church, St Jerome’s popularity reached a peak during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Having been exposed to the pan-European diffusion of humanism and humanist nationalism, Croatian-Dalmatian churchmen and lay humanists turned Jerome into their national patron saint and the emblematic figure of their nation. This paper draws attention to a historical-liturgical booklet that testifies to the wide popularity of the saint in Croatian-Dalmatian intellectual circles, specifically among the schiavone diaspora of Venice. The booklet, which was prepared in 1498 in Venice, consists of two texts: one is a polemical treatise on the origin of St Jerome composed by a certain V. S., while the other is a hymn and a prayer to the saint composed by a certain N. Ia. Sa. The texts were preserved on a slightly damaged folium among the papers of the fifteenth-century notary and canon of Zadar Cathedral, Jerolim Viduli？ (ca. 1440–1499). Although they have received little attention, the texts are not completely unknown in Croatian scholarship. They were even published, though separately, with numerous errors and dubious editorial decisions by Vinko Val？i？ and Petar Runje. The paper starts by shedding light on the identity of Jerolim Viduli？. It is suggested that Viduli？ received the texts through his personal or family connections to Venice, where he lived during the late 1470s and early 1480s, perhaps in the household of Maffeo Vallaresso, archbishop of Zadar. Viduli？ is presented as a humanist who left very little of his own writing, yet who had a penchant for collecting short pieces of both humanist and Croatian vernacular literature. In the last year of his life, Viduli？ received the booklet from Venice and then made a close-packed transcription on a single paper folium, unfortunately omitting the full names of its authors. The first of the two texts that form the booklet is V. S.’s Preface on the Origin of St Jerome. V. S. defines his treatise as a ？preface to our prayer？; it is an invective against Biondo Flavio and other Italian historians who are ？envious of our nation？ and ？falsely claim that Jerome was an Italian？. V. S. constructs his preface around a series of arguments disproving this claim. First, Jerome was not born in Istria, as Italian historians maintain, since the saint himself states that his hometown of Stridon was located in the middle, i.e. on the border, of Dalmatia and Pannonia, neither of which is contiguous with Istria. Indeed,