Mikó Árpád szerk.: Reneissance year 2008 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2008/1)

EDIT MADAS, FERENC FÖLDESI: Star in The Raven's Shadow. János Vitéz and the Beginnings of Humanism in Hungary

Victormus Codex ot János Vitéz, before 1462 Budapest, Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, Cod. Lai. MO. world but matching the spirit of Christian humanism — and medieval and contemporary authors, works on literary and scientific as well as theological topics, of which particularly important for him were codices on astronomy. The Florentine bookseller also highlights the handsomeness of the codices and the fact that their texts had been verified. The 15th century humanists regarded as their prime task the reconstruction as accurately as possible of the text of the ancient authors they so ardently admired. They acquired more and more codices, even several copies of the same work if they saw the hope of a better, fuller variant of the text. An indication of this in Vitéz' collection is the number of Livy codices: three illuminated codices containing hardly a correction, and a "working codex", full of notes and corrections in the owner's hand. Correction mostly meant primary corrections, some ot which were carried out in the copying studio: entry of missing words, correction of miswritten words. Since the codices did not have tables of contents in the modern sense, the marginal notes also served as a guide to the content. Vitéz was a true humanist in this field, too, a habitual einender. He filled the margins of the ancient rhetorician Victorinus' comment on Cicero's treatise on rhetoric with notes which add up to much more than a guide to the contents, they form an outline of his own essay on rhetoric. Many of Vitéz' notes also serve as a testament to his individual interests. In historical books, he marks important points of the text with a distinctive note-symbol and writes out historical and geographical names in the margin, and often terms of Hungarian relevance (Pannónia, Hungan). This category of corrections and notes demanded from the emender — i.e. the owner of the codex - an excellent knowledge of Latin gained from ancient authors. The full reconstruction of a text, however, usually demanded a model copy. Vitéz — like many of his Central European contemporaries — acquired most of his codices from Florentine copying studios. Florence was one of the centres of European "book publishing" from the middle of the century; its copying studios were indeed commercial ventures which attempted to sell works of classical authors in the highest numbers possible and meet the demands of their customers. The pursuit of perfection in copying the text, seeking out the best text variant and including the latest philological scholarship were therefore not among their top priorities. Texts acquired by collectors were consequently often deficient and degraded. Correcting the copying errors and deficiencies in Hungary, where in the middle of the century only Janus Pannonius had a humanist collection that might be mentioned alongside that of Vitéz, was not an easy job. There were no model copies available to compare with the text of a newly-acquired codex. Vitéz' comments at the end of some books often indicate this difficulty: "I have corrected it as far as I could, as far as is possible." These words recur again and again. It is no doubt because of the lack of reliable texts Comment of fános Vitéz at the end of the Victorinus Codex (Nagyszeben [Sibiu], 1462) Budapest, Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, Cod. Lai. MO.