Petrőczi Éva: Holt költők társaságában. A Puritanizmuskutató Intézet és a Medgyesi Pál Puritán Kiskönyvtár emlékére - Nemzet, egyház, művelődés 9. (Sárospatak, 2014)

István Czeglédi, the Martyr-Preacher of Kassa and a Faithful Student of the Netherlands

complete, and numerous progressive ideas were born and developed. In the Golden Age Holland was a great cultural power. Five Universities (Leiden, Franeker, Utrecht, Groeningen and Harderwijk) and nine athenaeums (colleges) functioned. They assured Holland’s lengthy, leading role in European Protestant theology... A large number of treatises witness that they received a progressive education, not only in theology and philosophy, but also in classical languages and natural sciences. When they returned home, they brought along the knowledge that they acquired, the books they wrote or brought, and the ideas they were influenced by. All of these became a part of Hungarian intellectual culture. To quote the comparison (in my opinion rather the simile E. P!) of Pál Debreceni Ember »they came back from their European round trips filled with knowledge and experience, as Jason from Colchis with the golden fleece.«”292

Returning now to the Fridrik Spanheim-István Czeglédi relationship: apart from the already quoted, „captatio benevolentiae” like formula in the title of his Leiden dissertation, Czeglédi was not very often mentioning his tutor’s very name, but consequently followed what he had learnt from him when composing his witty and sometimes even acidly humorous an- ti-Catholic argumentations. But - four years after István Czeglédi’s martyrdom - his foster-son, Samuel Köleséri praised Spanheim’s significance in the dedication of the posthumous edition of Czeglédi’s perhaps most significant work, entitled: The Fortress of Sion: “In the Belgian (e.g. Dutch!, but Holland was usually called like this in early modern Hungarian texts!) academies he (Czeglédi) became so well-educated, most of all in the one of Leiden, by the famous theologian, speaking with great eloquence, called Fridericus Span- heimius, first of all in the field of polemic theology (Polemica Theologia) that even this alien nation (the Dutch) paid homage to him, because of his great dexterity in the art of disputation.”293

With Czeglédi’s final dissertation upon the Holy Supper at the University of Leiden, we slowly arrive to Deventer where the exact date of his matriculation was the 14th August, 1645. After a short publication of Lajos Segesvári, in which the name of Czeglédi’s Deventer tutor is mentioned as

292 Opening text of the exhibition by Katalin Berkes, ibid., 7-8.

293 Czeglédi István 1675, (**) Ív. - Dedication to Mihály Apafi, Prince of Transylvania, translated by Eva Petrőczi.

137