Rumiana Damianova

Signs of the Memory

Summary

The cultural tradition of the Bulgarian Renaissance includes texts containing or directed towards creating memory. Such texts are books’ dedications, endowments’ texts, panegyrics, and testaments. The present investigation comments on their role in the cultural practice of that time and their functional incorporation into the Renaissance texts. The corpus of the dedications was differentiated and it includes 85 dedications, separate or included in the titles of the books. The relations between the dedication and the foreword of a book have been studied as para-texts as well as the role of the dedications and the testaments as cultural phenomena, oriented towards creating memory.