Localizing the accentuated handwritten medical guide of 1686 (RSL, f. 310, no. 697)

The Old Russian accentuated handwritten medical guide of 1686 has not been studied thus far. It was written by a deacon of Our Lady of the Sign cathedral in Novgorod. Stress accentuation in the manuscript appears very widely (up to 98 %); also, the book shows significant dialect features typical of both Western and Eastern accentual zones. That provides grounds to localize the writer’s dialect. The article consists of a brief analysis of the accentual system in the manuscript and careful consideration of specific phonetic and grammatical features, which are indicative of the book’s localization. On the basis of the research reported here, the manuscript can be tentatively assigned to the frontier zone of the Seliger and Torzhok dialects, on the border with the Novgorod region, but not in the city of Novgorod itself.