Notitia hungáriae novae historico geographica (Budapest, 2011)

BEVEZETÉS - A szöveg tipográfiája - Irodalomjegyzék és mutatók

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INTRODUCTION

cal. Bél often did not follow its source in the spelling of proper names but kept himself to his own practice. For instance he always writes Trentsiniensis and he also keeps this form in quoting a source regardless that it’s different in the source. It is also frequent that he implements his peculiar orthographical principles (presented above) when quoting from other sources: e.g. he corrects the assimilations as assero, affero etc. back to adf-, ads-. Besides he modernizes the orthography of the medieval letters according to the humanist orthography (e.g. nostrae donationis instead of nostre donacionis). Furthermore he does not hesitate to change the word order written in the source when not liking it. Or he can ommit words, half-phrases without notice. In these cases, when we were sure about the in- tentionality of the alteration, we did not correct Bél’s work, we only gave notice in a text critical note that in the original source there is a difference.

Explanatory notes

In the explanatory notes we mainly refer to the exact place of Bél’s citations and references, when the author did not do so himself. Hereby we reveal if Bél’s source has a modern edition. In the explanatory notes we will also treat complicated textual problems, for instance eventual deficiency of the text (e.g. Bél refers to a drawing of coat of arms but it has never been prepared). The identification of proper and geographical names and their explanations are placed in the indexes instead of the notes. The explanatory notes are found under the philological notes in italics, signed by stars (*, **, etc.).

Typography of the text

As for the typographical setting of the text, we evidently took the volumes edited by Bél (Bél 1735- 1749?) as an example. It was easy to follow the methods used in Bél’s edition since Bél (or his scribe copying him) always indicated in which typographical font a certain word or passage should be printed, even in the manuscripts of the county descriptions he could not publish in his lifetime. To name a few examples: he indicated by a simple underline the texts to be printed in italics (proper or geographical names, citations); and with a double underline the parts to be typeset in small capitals (important proper or geographical names and inscriptions); by longer citations he instructed the typographer to use italics or to put quotation marks at the beginning of the lines. In addition Bél prepared a short summary of content on the margin of the text in every manuscript he wrote. Therefore in the edition we should do nothing else but to respect the typography indicated in the manuscript.39

One can object whether it is worth bothering with the typography of 18th century in a modern critical edition in the 21st century. We think it is, beacuase Bél’s typography is practical: the margins make the text easy to follow and the proper and geographical names in italics or small capitals make it easy to search. Further to that, we consider obligatory to follow the example of the volumes edited in the lifetime of Bél, in which these principals prevailed, since we continue with our edition the work begun by the author. We also had to consider that the elaboration of the typography and its application in the text is Bél’s own work and the underlinings can be looked upon as part of the content as

39 This is how we published the Latin text of the description of Sopron county (along with its Hungarian translation). See Bél 2001-2006.