The Pilgrimage of Abbot Daniel, the oldest pilgrimage account from Rus&soft; (early twelfth century), paradoxically finds its oldest preserved copies in the hand of perhaps the most modern scribe of fifteenth-century Rus&soft;, the hieromonk and and elder, Efrosin (fl. at Kirillov Monastery, ca. 1463–1491). Efrosin compiled encyclopedic books, innovative in their content and their form: he edited texts in a new way, glossing historical names, dates, and places, removing the allegorical and amplifying the factual, referencing other texts and codices explicitly, and joining disparate works bearing shared narrative or factual elements. His editing work shows traits of scholasticism as a mode of thought (cf. Cabezón's work on comparative scholasticism)—a concern with language, proliferativity and completeness, a belief in the epistemological accessibility, systematicity, and rationality of the world, and a concise understanding of knowledge—so that we are justified in calling it proto-scholastic. Thus, his copy of the Pilgrimage is not a representative manuscript—it is not useful for reconstructing the original text—but rather opens a window to an important moment in the evolution of thought.

A comparison of the full redaction of the Pilgrimage with Efrosin's versions shows how traditional monastic modes of textual interpretation—which originally conformed to the oral, non-hierarchical and edificatory lectio divina and the word of the charismatic father—gave way to reading in a modern sense, hierarchical, and information-seeking. Through proto-scholastic editing, (1) hagiography, apocrypha, and epic are all reinterpreted as history, and how history is ultimately reduced to an encyclopedia of the human world, while the past, distinguished from the present, is sacralized, and (2) parables are reinterpreted as natural science, and science is in turn reduced to an encyclopedia of the natural world. I will examine Efrosin's two redactions of the Pilgrimage of Abbot Daniel, and show how the work is successively transformed from a pilgrimage to a treasury of information. Following Illich (cf. his In the Vineyard of the Text), this may be seen as an allegory of the evolution of monastic reading in Rus&soft;: reading, which was once a pilgrimage through a book, becomes a search through a treasure-house of facts.