Authors

Discussion

Abraham was the bishop of the Bavarian diocese of Freising from 957 till 994. During his tenure of nearly four decades, he certainly made his mark on history. The first that springs to mind when we think about the bishop are the so-called Freising Momuments (Slo. Brižinski spomeniki), consisting of   a confession of sins, an exhortation to penance and a confessional formula and are written in Slavic. What is even more peculiar is that they were penned down using the Latin script. Over the past two centuries, most research on the texts has been done in the palaeographic and linguistic sphere, with much less attention to their historical context. We know that these texts were used in a missionary context, as they are written in the Slavic vernacular and their content is of crucial importance in the early days of the conversion without losing its value after a solid base for worship was established. When taking a look at the direct context of the Freising Monuments, namely the rather eclectic Codex Latinus Monacensis 6426 of which they are  part, we can detect that in fact all the texts of the manuscript were really meant to be there in order to serve a common purpose. We can be assume that the manuscript was created upon request and under supervision of bishop Abraham in order to serve the Slavic inhabitants of a newly acquired domain in what is now the area of Škofja Loka in Slovenia. By the second half of the tenth century Freising already had quite some experience taking care of the Slavic souls living on its grounds in other parts of Carantania. It was therefore not surprising to find out that there are in fact multiple manuscripts that can be linked to mission and pastoral care in the area of Škofja Loka, which gives even more cachet to the role Abraham played for Christianity in Carantania.