Notitia hungáriae novae historico geographica (Budapest, 2011)
BEVEZETÉS - A szöveg tipográfiája - Irodalomjegyzék és mutatók
30 INTRODUCTION III. Method of the text edition and the structure of each volume Philological study of the manuscripts of the county descriptions: Introductions written before the descriptions As already mentioned above, before editing the county descriptions it is necessary to study the description’s copies and its related documents (correspondance, official revisions etc.) in order to fully understand the creation history, and to determine which copy was the best elaborated still in Bél’s lifetime (in some cases this fullest version remained in a later copy), which is to be the basis of the edition. This study was taken for each county description. Each study consists of four chapters. The first one is the stemma of the manuscripts; the second is the demonstration of the process of creating the county description; the third is the presentation of the different manuscripts and the fourth is the summarizing data. Below we give some short information of the structure of these chapters and the signs used therein. 1. Stemma of the manuscripts We start the examination by the geneological tree (stemma) of the manuscripts that relate to the actual county description. It is not a regular stemma in its classical sense, since we examined not (only) the posthumous copies and variants, but also the process of the text grown or shortened by new information or revisions in the author’s lifetime, thus resulting in many corrected versions. Naturally, we indicated the different data input or revisions in the stemma that influenced the final content of the work. The manuscripts are signed in the following way: the different copies of the county descriptions are signed with ABC in alphabetical order (a, B, c), meaning that “a” stands for the first made version and “b” for the second version etc. If the manuscript in question remained we signed it with a capital letter (A), consequently when it was lost we used small letters (a). If we speak about a copy that’s existence is dubious we marked it with Italics (a). The uncorrected version is marked by 1 in the upper index (A1) and the corrected copies (there can be several of them, if the manuscript was corrected by different hands or in different periods) we signed with consecutive indexes (A2, A3 etc.). The materials e.g. data collections, letters etc. sent to Bél are marked by the initials of the author or of the title in square brackets ([Bu], [Re], [Ad] etc.). Square brackets indicate that these manuscripts don’t belong directly to the lineage of the descriptions. Similarly, official revisions are generally marked within square brackets. The county authorities’ revision is uniformally signed with [Com] (abbreviating “Comitatus”) while the censorship of the Chancellary is signed with [Cane] (from “Cancellaria”). There was eventually two different revisions made by the county authorities (an unofficial and an official) - as we have written in our thesis30 - in these cases we had to apply [Com]1 and [Com]1’ signals to differentiate them. It also happened that Bél sent different parts of the description to the Chancellary at different times in which cases the two (or more) revisions of the Chancellary will be differentiated in the same way ([Cane]1', [Canc]b etc.). The relations of the manuscripts were signed by arrows. A continuous arrow means descendance between two manuscripts of the county description. A dashed arrow shows how a manuscript is related 30 See Tóth 2007.1. 139-141.
