Notitia hungáriae novae historico geographica (Budapest, 2011)

BEVEZETÉS - A szöveg tipográfiája - Irodalomjegyzék és mutatók

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INTRODUCTION

of the Notitia,6 The remaining 37 county descriptions alongside with the Jász-Kun districts’ description were left in manuscripts due to the revising county authorities’ negligence or hostility, and the problems with the printery. These manuscripts have been scattered to several archives or collections. Although since Bél’s time many of the county descriptions have been published in Hungarian (and some in Slovak) translation,7 their scientific standards are uneven. In many of the cases there aren’t any notes or scientific introduction, the translations are often abridged or based unfortunately on a manuscript that is not the fullest version. Most of them, with some exceptions, don’t include the Latin text, eventhough in the matter of sources left in manuscript the publishing of the original text can be expected, especially in the case of such a significant work as the Notitia. Unfortunately the problems are not thus ended, but we limit ourselves to name the most important of them: the grave errors in translation, due to the translator’s insufficient knowledge of Bél’s style or because he was not familiar with Bél’s other works and concentrated only on his duty in a limited sense (without external context).

Thus Mátyás Bél’s Notitia is still not fully accessible and the printed and translated county descriptions are often objectionable. Therefore it is necessary to make a reliable critical edition of the descriptions remained in manuscripts. An entire edition will make it possible to fully benefit from the values of Notitia (the valuable data about Hungary in 18th century) but will also allow the overall analysis of the Notitias content as well as setting up Mátyás Bél’s profile as a historian and geographer. Bél was far more than a diligent collector of datas, he was a historian in possession of a sense of history and of an image about Hungary that points a lot further than the scale of the county descriptions, and he had a clear and gigantic historiographical concept, whose opus magnum, the Notitia hides more interest than what we could learn about it based on the few translations not worth of its merits.

I. Road to the complete edition

Although in the past two and a half centuries the project of the complete edition of Notitia emerged many times, these initiatives somehow all came to nothing.8 According to us, there are three main factors resulting in this continuous failure:

1. Bél’s legacy of manuscripts was scattered away to different places and the most important part of it that contained the major part of the county descriptions - that József Batthyány, archbishop of Kalocsa and later Esztergom, bought in 1769 - was badly water damaged during the transport on the Danube.9 These unlucky circumstances made it difficult to plan the complete edition.

2. It is a difficulty for the edition that the county descriptions exist in several different versions and the manuscripts’ philological systematisation is complicated and problematic. A certain description

6 See Bél 1735—1749? As for the circumstances of the edition see Kollarova 2006. 29-40. (Her reseacrhes are chiefly based on the correspondance of Matthias Bél.)

7 For the newest list of translations see Tóth 2007. I. 171—175., and also the summarising data after each county description’s presentation in the 2nd volume.

8 About these initiatives see Szelestei 1984. 7., 10-11., 16-17. Tie last time The Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences put on its agenda the edition of collected works and legacy of Mátyás Bél in 1979. Tie task was entrusted to Imre Wellmann (see Wellman 1979. 381. and the editor’s note on the same page), however it was never accomplished.

9 See Szelestei 1984. 8-16.; Tóth 2007.1. 13-15.