Slovenian literature of the early modern period is characterized by a fact common to some smaller European literatures: because of difficult access to printing, manuscript culture played an important role in this literature from the early seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. For certain literary genres of this period, the existence of texts, their textual transmission, distribution, and reader reception could be based almost exclusively on the medium of the manuscript. When Enlightenment censorship began to suppress Baroque Catholic literature in the late eighteenth century, Slovenian manuscript culture was a means of perpetuating the literary tradition in a persistent and creative way. This article outlines six groups of Slovenian manuscripts that managed to do so, albeit only for a limited period of time.
