Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)

SPIRIT AND MOOD - A Decade-long Struggle for the Academy of Law

in schools where there were at least eight university professors in teaching positions and who possessed all the proper credentials. It was expected that, after the introduction of these new regulations, the schools which could not host final state examinations would be quickly abandoned. All the Protestant law academies were obviously at risk as they operated with between five and seven professors, thus differing from their Catholic counterparts which had been operating according to these new standards for quite some time. Patak lacked one department and chair at its school and it was only added in 1896 after years of dedicated hard work to this end. It was typical that this implementation which Pest pushed vigorously had already been applied in Patak well before the MNER’s reforms in regulation were officially in force. It is not a coincidence that the bulletin issued by the Patak College said that “if the promised reforms are delayed even further, the ministry of education cannot escape the suspicion that their proposed ideas were nothing but an attempt at making it impossible for certain rural law institutions to continue operations.”

This period was characterized by a paradigm shift in intellectual thinking at the Academy of Law in Patak. Slowly, the so-called ‘Emődy era’ came to an end. For three decades, Dániel Emődy (1819-1891) defined the intellectual development of the institution. Emődy was a well-known public figure in intellectual circles in Hungary. His father, István Emődy was a secondary school teacher in Sárospatak but he himself did not attend the College there. After his studies in Szikszó and Szepesség he went to Pest and passed the bar examinations there. He was relatively old (forty-four) when he became a teacher in Patak. Before that, in 1848, he was the intellectual leader of the constitutional movement and was widely known for his newspaper articles. He actively participated in the revolutionary events in Pest and in the war of independence. Bertalan Szemere appointed him to edit the government’s newspaper in 1849. In addition to harbouring decidedly patriotic inclinations, he spoke many languages and was well-educated in political sciences and law; he had an extensive network of relations, being, for example, close friends with the legendary writer, Zsigmond Kemény who was the private teacher of the future prime minister, Kálmán Tisza. All these helped him to make Sárospatak an intellectual centre once again, by the simple act of his moving from the capital to Sárospatak. He gave up his previous, mostly practical activities to immerse himself in academic tasks. A lawyer and publicist by profession, he quickly evolved into a veritable teacher. Similar to Kövy, he also believed that practical education and religious-patriotic education should go hand in hand. He never developed into a true academic and his only book worth mentioning is one concerning private law. His former prime preoccupation of writing articles gave way to his quietly preparing for his classes as the somber professor that he became. On 11 April 1891, he announced his retirement, which was to officially take effect in September, but he passed away just a few days after his announcement.

Of his immediate colleagues, János Antalfy and Ferenc Nemes are certainly to be mentioned. János Antalfy (1828-1885), a Patak student, served his school for twenty years, first as a secondary school teacher from 1857 to 1862 and then as Emődy’s right-hand man. He taught criminal law and commercial law, his only published book was on exchange law. Ferenc Nemes (1834-1898) also studied theology and law in Patak. He initially taught at the Teacher Training School and

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János Antalfi took over the editorship of the Sárospataki Füzetek from János Erdélyi