Acta Papensia 2002 - A Pápai Református Gyűjtemények Közleményei 2. évfolyam (Pápa, 2002)
1-2. szám - Műhely - Séra Bálint–Szalánszki Edit: Falra hányt ördög
Műhely SUMMARY BÁLINT SÉRA - EDIT SZALÁNSZKI Like water off the devil’s back... Religious and belief motifs in the IT-W century handwritten Protestant manuscripts The paper wishes to contribute to the study of the topic by introducing the belief motifs of the Protestant preachings (found among the manuscripts of the Great Library of the Tiszántúli Calvinist District), which is one of the sections of a genre situated between the written and oral, and the elite and popular culture. Belief motifs can be considered to be a kind of source in coexistence with the official religion but ousted from among the written materials - although researchers can only spot some traces of verbalism, which are written, constructed signs in need of further interpretation. Their presence or absence can be a telltale sign. The paper, however, offers something more than the paradox of researches of this kind: on the on hand it examines the notion of motifs in the context of the science of literarature and the theoiy of literature (from where it incidentally originates), and on the other hand it introduces its instability through examples from preachings and by the „quasi-deconstruction” of the basic oppositions of the notion: form / contents, (marker / marked). The second half of the paper gives a short summary of the 17th—18th century basic rules and functions of written sermons, then it scrutinizes how far the Protestant Churches themselves, together with the dogmatics, contributed to the spread of the doctrine of the devil’s personal existence in folk religiosity. The study analyzes the neural-gic points of the systematization of the variants found not forgetting about the controversial nature of the notion of motifs (the question of categorizing variants into motifs, and motifs into types). Variants themselves are introduced through representative examples and motifs — with special emphasis on the elements pertaining to the devil-alliance type of motifs. According to the conclusion of the study, the particular genre of sermons’ nature and the dogmatics of the Protestant Church prevents the appearance of the phenomenon of folk religiosity in sermons; thus the genre of sermons cannot be considered to be the intersection of the elite and popular culture as viewed from this particular aspect. 138 Acta Papensia II. (2002) 1-2.
