This work owest its being to the intuition, insight and tenacity of KUJO MARKOV KUEV (1909-1991), the Bulgarian scholar who devoted the better part of his life to tracing the fate of the manuscript and text heritage of Bulgaria's "golden" and "silver" ages, the wellspring of Orthodox Slavic culture. His insight that philology is doomed to wither if it is not rooted in the firm ground of comprehensive documentary evidence, and his tenacity in assembling such evidence (buried, for the better part, in the repositories of what then was the Soviet Union) and making it accessible to the scholarly public are, indeed, remarkable. His Černorizec Hrabăr (Sofia 1967) and his Azbučnata molitva v slavjanskite literaturi (Sofia 1974) deserve a place of honor among source publications and wil serve as a foundation for scholarship for years to come.

Kuev rarely reduced his intuition to writing; he was much too conscious of his duty to the factual basis of scholarship to do so. But in the summer of 1969, when he received me in his office #144 on the third floor of Sofia University and made me a present of his 1967 book, he told me that he was working on a companion volume for the Alphabet Prayer, because he was convinced that these two texts together were not only prime sources for the study of the history, language and writing of Bulgaria in the early Middle Ages, but that their in-depth study would reveal many hitherto unsuspected secrets. At the time, I thought that he was merely hinting at the questions of chronology (the "Alexandrine" era reflected in the treatise On the Letters was then a widely degbated topic), but I now know that he must have felt that eventually they would give access to a vast range of problems involved in the beginnings of the transmission of texts in Church Slavic.

The work also owes a debt of gratitude to the pioneering efforts of two scholars who were the first to realise that the documentary evidence produced by Kuev could be used to study texts preserved in MSS of the most diverse chronological and geographic provenance as a closely knit family, ALDA GIAMBELLUCAA-KOSSOVA (Palermo) and VOJTĚCH TKADLČĨK (Olomouc). They produced reasoned classifications and comprehensive evaluations of the evidence provided by Kuev, as well as the first non-intuitive reconstructions of the archetypal texts. Their editions and commentaries are monuments to the assumptions, insights and methods of a century and a half of scholarly tradition and a beacon on the road to knowledge.

Finally, it gratefully acknowledges the contributions of those who have been instrumental in guiding it through the final stages of gestation: Mario Capaldo, Henry Cooper, Emilia Guergova, Mary Allen Johnson, Roland Marti, Predrag Matejić and Olga Nedeljković. It come not have been completed without the generous support of The Ohio State University in Columbus and its Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies: its material base provided the missing keystones, and its setting above the beautiful Oval of the campus under a mild Indian summer sun the room for consideration and moderation.

This work is dedicated to the students and scholars who will carry the study of Church Slavic texts into the 21st century. I trust that they will acknowledge the importance of the most fundamental question of textology, Utrum in alterum abiturum erat? (Of two readings, which is more likely to have been corrupted into the other?). If they follow its lead, they will come to appreciate the arduous process by which these texts have reached us and gain new insights into their linguistic, literary and cultural features. Its lead will ultimately put them in a position to make judgments on the fundamental differences between the culture that generated and transmitted them and the cultures which fostered the texts of classical antiquity and the vernacular texts of Western and Central Europe.