Walker Riggs Thompson is known, among other things, for translating liturgical texts, as well as developing handwritten text recognition (HTR) tools to transcribe historical multilingual texts. Thompson’s Epifanii Slavinetskii’s Greek-Slavonic-Latin Lexicon between East and West is a revised version of his doctoral dissertation at Heidelberg University in Germany. We do not have evidence where Epifanii Slavinetskii (ca. 1600–75) was born or grew up, but it is inferred on the basis of his language skills that he attended the Kyiv Brotherhood School (Kijowska szkoła bracka) and taught at the renamed Kyiv Mohyla College (Collegium Kijovense Mohileanum). He went to Moscow in 1649 at the behest of Tsar Aleksei (r. 1645–76) to work on a new edition of the Bible. His Lexicon was probably begun in Kyiv and completed ca. 1670 in Moscow, but has been little studied, in part, because of the linguistic and paleographic skills required to study it and, in part, because of its sheer size (more about that below). Thompson demonstrates that he has the skills (not to mention determination) and proposes three hypotheses for his research. The first is that “Latin influence will be manifested in the dictionary lexically through Slavonic morphematic calques from Latin, or so-called ‘internationalisms’ (or ‘Europeanisms’)—that is, Greek loanwords transmitted via Latin into the new European written languages of the Early Modern era” (20). The context of this hypothesis is “the persistent view in the scholarship that Epifanii Slavinetskii was a ‘Graecophile’” despite the evidence that “Latin and Greek influences can be seen existing side-by-side and interacting in his written works.”

The second hypothesis is that “we can anticipate that Ms. [GIM,] Syn Gr. 383 exhibits distinctively Ruthenian (ortho)graphical, phonetic/phonological, and morphological features that set it apart from the prevalent Muscovite (Russian) Church Slavonic variety of the era” (20). The context of this hypothesis is that the Syn Gr. 383 manuscript copy of the Lexicon is thought to be Epifanii’s autograph based on the identification of it as the manuscript referred to in a 1697 ukaz issued by Patriarch Adrian (r. 1690–1700) for it to be copied. Thus, whatever differences it exhibits from Muscovite Church Slavonic of the time (discussed in the book’s §6.1), according to Thompson, should shed light on “Epifanii’s Ruthenian origins.” It is more likely, however, that those differences shed light on where Epifanii learned Church Slavonic and on the Ruthenian prosta mova of the time than on his own ethnic origins, a point that Thompson more or less acknowledges later in the book (253–54). In that regard those linguistic difference could also be used as evidence of the so-called “Third South Slavic influence.”

Thompson’s “third and final hypothesis is that the GSL (the Greek-Slavonic-Latin Lexicon) exhibits features of a developed (Church) Slavonic academic (i.e., scholarly or ‘scientific’…) language. The development of scientific terminology and scholarly conventions was a process that was common across Early Modern European linguistic communities….It is reasonable to assume that Epifanii’s dictionary played some role in this process for the East Slavic written language of the time, or at least reflected existing processes and trends” (21). Later in the work, Thompson refers to Epifanii’s Slavonic as “book language” (knizhnyi iazyk) (255). He points out as an example of “scholarly conventions” to Epifanii’s use of Arabic numerals for general enumeration purposes in the Lexicon while reserving the Cyrillic/Byzantine numerical system for biblical references (129). This third hypothesis seems rather self-evident when one considers that to aid humanist scholars with their study of classical texts, a number of Greek and multilingual lexicons including Greek were created in western Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including those of Hesychios of Alexandria, Henri Estienne II, Johann Scapula, and Ambrosio Calepino. Further east in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, however, the focus was on Latin and multilingual lexicons including Latin, Grzegorz Knapiusz’s Thesaurus polonolatinograecus (Kraków, 1621–26) to the contrary notwithstanding. The one exception to this trend from Greek-Latin to Latin as one moves eastward is Epifanii’s Lexicon. The 774 folia of Syn Gr. 383 in folio are estimated by Thompson to have over 500,000 cross entries and would take “around 500 work days, or about two and a half work years under ideal conditions” to copy (407). It was truly a monumental lexicon, even by western European standards of the time.

Thompson’s main focus is on linguistics, and the book more than fulfills the relevant criteria in that category, but it is much more than this. It provides deep dives at every turn into the historiography in relation to Epifanii’s Lexicon and dictionary work of the time. Section 3 (80–131), which analyzes the ms. Syn Gr. 383 itself, could be used as a primer on Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic paleography of the mid- to late seventeenth century in Ruthenia and Muscovy. In addition, the book makes a significant contribution to the study of Ruthenian and Muscovite intellectual doings during that time. Those interested in the study of the seventeenth century would do well to take note of it.