Notitia hungáriae novae historico geographica (Budapest, 2012)
Sopron vármegye
40 SOPRON COUNTY Finally some willingness for providing data must be supposed from the part of the Esterházy family. Otherwise it would not be clear how Bél could describe so accurately the Kismarton residence’s assembly room’s ancestors’ gallery or the inscriptions of the Fraknó castle. Obviously in Sopron county’s description Bél wanted to commemorate dutifully the ancestors of the Esterházy family, as he regularly did in case of the aristocrtic families.56 This is the reason behind the above mentioned presentation of the ancestors’ gallery or the family history of the Esterházys embedded in the history of Fraknó. In this latter he used Pál Esterházys compiled, mostly Active family history entitled Trophaeum:57 he certainly quoted two records from it and the use of Pál Esterházys work can be traced in other respects as well. Meanwhile to credit Bél’s critical sense, he starts the family history with Miklós Esterházy (1583-1645) thus tactfully avoiding the previous ancestors, invented by Pál Esterházy, at least he does not comment on the fictional ancestors’ gallery, nor on the record by King Leopold from 1681 that enumerates equally the fictitious ancestors.58 The description is published respecting the principles presented in the first volume.59 We used mainly three manuscripts for the publication of the text: manuscripts G and K that remained in their full lengths and that constitute together the latest but one version of the text, alongside with manuscript M by Gyurikovits that as mentioned above, contains several excerpts from the last but lost manuscript 1. The text edition was prepared based on texts of G and K since they together form a full text. We used manuscript M the following way: where we could amend the corrupt text of G or K by the excerpts originating from 1 then we amended the text part (obviously making note of the corrupt form and the relating page number of manuscript M). The differing text variants or supplements of the fragments copied from 1 - meaning corrections or additions posterior to manuscripts G and K - are published in appendix, on the left side with the relating text part from G or K, on the right showing the variant or addition in manuscript M. We indicated the differences of manuscript M with italics,60 From the additions it is clear that elderly Bél did not write considerable additions to his work, but he dated the corrections - as it was his habit happily for posterity: he marked that he revised the manuscript in August 1749.61 Since Bél died on 29th August we can be sure that manuscript 1 was the last text version that Bél saw and corrected. Although G and K are transcripts of good quality (they were made in Bél’s lifetime), some functional additions needed to be made. We supplemented the headers since they were mostly missing from the manuscripts we used. Sometimes we had to supply the synopses before bigger chapters from the margin notes (based on which Bél composed those synopses), or we had to correct them. The biggest challenge concering the content was undoubtedly the identification of the huge quantity of printed and handwritten sources (records) in which our colleague Boglárka Weisz provided priceless contribution. The basis of the text edition consists of the bilingual (Latin-Hungarian) edition of Sopron county’s description. We were part of preparing this at that time:62 Balázs Déri, Miklós Földváry and Gergely Tóth translated and revised the General Part and an early version of the description of Sorpon city, while the remaining parts of the county description and a later variant of Sopron city’s description was translated and revised by Gergely Tóth. Gergely Tóth also wrote discourses about the creation process of the work in volume 1 and 3; Katalin Mária Kineses wrote the explanatory notes, prepared the indexes and edited the volumes. We kept the previous text editing (since we mostly made it ourselves) 56 See for example the description of Vas county in the present volume and the relating introduction. 57 See Trophaeum 1700. 58 Cf. Tóth 2010.325-326. About the Trophaeum and Pál Esterházys fictitious familiy history most recently see Fazekas 2010. 59 See Bél 2011.32-34. See also the general preface in this volume. 60 See the appendix in pp. 236-241. We decided to publish these extracts separately (and not incorporated to the text), because we hold only excerpts of the last version and we cannot be certain that Gyurikovits noticed all the supplements or that he published correctly what he noticed. 61 See the review of manuscript 1 in chapter 3. 62 See Bél 2001-2006.
