The book “Romanian Manuscripts from Foreign Collections of the XIII-XIX Centuries”, assembled by the late Valentina Pelin and edited posthumously, has been presented on Wednesday at the National Library of Moldova.

Destined mainly for the academia, the volume incorporates over 300 religious, literary and scientific texts authored in the 18th-19th centuries in the Romanian space or by expatriated Romanians. The manuscripts were retrieved from libraries, archives and museums located in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Besides the collection assembled by Valentina Pelin, the volume also includes eleven codices from the Stephen the Great era which the author didn’t manage to incorporate herself.

The volume was published on the initiative of Academician Andrei Eșanu and his wife, Doctor of History Valentina Eșanu.

“During her last months, having all these excerpts from medieval manuscripts already collected, she asked us to make sure that her work wasn’t lost. We inherited her legacy and started publishing one study after another before seeing the entire book published”, stated Andrei Eșanu during the launching event.

Elena Pintilei, director of the National Library, thanked the Eșanu family for their contribution to the collection assembled by the late Valentina Pelin.

Valentina Pelin was born in 1950 in the village of Pirjota, Riscani. She started as a teacher of Romanian grammar and literature before becoming a scholar. In 1997 she took her doctoral degree from the Bucharest University with a thesis dedicated to the libraries of the monasteries Neamt and Noul-Neamt. From 2001 and until her death in 2006, Valentina Pelin worked as a researcher at the Moldovan Academy of Sciences’ Institute of History.