Kasza Péter (szerk.): Stephanus Brodericus - Epistulae (Bibliotheca Scriptorum Medii Recentisque Aevorum, Series Nova XIV., Argumentum Kiadó - Magyar Országos Levéltár, Budapest, 2012)
On the Correspondence of István Brodarics
main task was providing information. On the other hand, they are obscure understandably. Diplomatic letter is a sensitive genre, especially when it is sent through the enemy's territory. It can easily fall into the wrong hands, so it is not always wise to commit everything to paper. The letters often only authenticate the persons carrying them who would provide the real information, which, of course, is lost for us. The factor which influences Humanistic letter writing, i.e. that it is not only the actual addressee who can read it but it can spread through copies or be printed for a wider audience creates a reverse situation for Brodarics. What is a desirable goal for Erasmus is a risk for Bro- darics which should be avoided. His letters, in many cases, are not obscure because it does not occur to him that beyond the addressee, who understands the meanings of allusions and hints, others may also read them, but on the contrary: he is wary of this! Nothing shows the importance of secrecy more than the fact that there are some letters in which some lines are coded. The third reason is the lack of a letter book. Actually, we do not know whether or not he had the intention of collecting and publishing his correspondence. In any case, there is no trace of this. If he had such an idea, the circumstances outlined above were more than enough to thwart it. And, at the same time, we cannot exclude the possibility that Brodarics had absolutely no intention to compile a letter book. Since his correspondence touched upon specific issues and topics related to then current politics, which means that it was not literary ambition that made him write the letters, why would he have wanted to get them published? The lack of a letter book does not only have an impact on the number of extant letters: according to our present knowledge, we have 254 letters from Brodarics. The prominent high priest must have written a multiple of that number during his lifetime. Because he himself did not pay attention to collecting his letters (or at least we do not know about that), those survived mostly in private archives (like the Nádasdy archives) or in foreign archives (Cracow, Vienna, Rome) at places to where he wrote for diplomatic reasons mostly. These princely or official archives collect specifically the kinds of letters that Brodarics wrote as part of his work; private letters are, naturally, rare among them. This should caution us when we formulate propositions on the nature of his letters. Due to the lack of a letter book there is no way of getting a realistic, undistorted image of Brodarics’ qualities as a letter writer. Since it was not him who selected the letters to be preserved, letters of higher literary quality might be exactly the ones that are lost. So, due to the three above reasons, the correspondence basically consists of letters of diplomatic nature. However, even though their subjects are not literary or artistic issues, and citations from classical authors are scarce in them, the letters are not without certain essential Humanistic virtues: first of all they are written in an extraordinarily polished fluent Latin. Their rhetorical elaboration is beyond dispute. Brodarics is a master of words. If needed, he compliments, even flatters in an artfully elegant way as demonstrated by his letter to Angelo Cospi or by some others to Miklós Oláh. If it happens to be necessary he applies classical authors with effortless ease and confidence for supporting his argument. Based on his letters, he is undoubtedly worthy of being ranked among the greatest figures of Humanism in Hungary. 23
