Csapodi Csaba, Csapodiné Gárdonyi Klára: Bibliotheca Hungarica. Kódexek és nyomtatott könyvek Magyarországon 1526 előtt. I. Fönnmaradt kötetek: 1. A–J (A MTAK közleményei 23. Budapest, 1988)

Bevezetés

Preface Probably, there is no other country where the stock of mediaeval codices and incunabula was so seriously damaged as in Hungary. In the largest part of the country the codices of the first centuries were destroyed by the Mongol invasion in 1241-42, then the products of the next 300 years had been decimated by the Turkish raids devastating the country over two centuries after the battle of Mohács (1526) and/or by the one and a half century Turkish rule. It should be emphasized that the country's most educated and most densely populated middle part where the majority of largest towns, bishopric sees and monasteries could be found was occupied by the Turks. However, in connection with book destruction the negative effect of the Reformation, which became widely spread in the sixteenth century Hungary and made the mediaeval and mainly theological and liturgical books superfluous, cannot be neglected either. Consequently, the deserted monasteries, together with their libraries, decayed. What remained in the more sheltered peripheries, namely, in Western Transdanubia, Northern Hungary and Transylvania or were taken abroad may make up 1-2 % of the original stock. And the majority of what is left is not in Hungary either. Naturally, the material taken abroad wandered to the libraries there and remained there, too. After World War I Western Transdanubia was annexed to Austria, Upper Hungary to Czechoslovakia, Transylvania to Romania. Thus these parts also became foreign lands. What can be found in the territory of today's Hungary got to the large libraries of Budapest mainly as the presents of the great Hungarian book collectors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or as the previous presents of the institutions of the disannexed parts of the country. The holdings of the library in cathedrals and monasteries reorganized after the Counter-Reformation and the cease of the Turkish rule came, with few exceptions, from abroad between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Only very few books from the Mediaeval Hungary might be among them owing to the afore-mentioned facts. This is why the Hungarian material of mediaeval origin in these libraries is rather insignificant. Under these conditions it is very important for the study of Hungarian mediaeval erudition to collect as fully as possible the catalogue - like descriptions of codices and printed books used in Hungary before 1526 still extant anywhere in the world as well as the data concerning the lost ones. With this aim many Hungarian experts have conducted wide-ranging research in the collections home and abroad in the past century, publishing a great quantity of data. However, these data can be found in thousands of different places scattered in periodicals and books. In today's tight financial situation it is impossible to carry out the beautiful project intended to be launched by the Mediaeval Commitee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1972. The objective of the project was to find codices of Hungarian origin in the collections of foreign libraries through regular searches. Now we must be satisfied only with listing, summarizing and making accesible to the public everything that has been revealed by research so far and supplementing it by all that can be done at home.