Notitia hungáriae novae historico geographica (Budapest, 2011)

BEVEZETÉS - A szöveg tipográfiája - Irodalomjegyzék és mutatók

INTRODUCTION

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may exist in a dozen copies since Bél was continuously correcting them and he got them copied again and again. It also contributed to the large number of copies that Bél was obliged to send the descriptions for revision to the Hungarian Royal Chancellary and to the county authorities through the Locotenetial Council (Consilium Regium Locumtenentiale) for which he needed extra copies. Very often the county authorities or private individuals made copies for themselves. Besides after Bél’s death there were obviously some more copies made. Consequently the descriptions’ edition or translation should be (should have been) prevented by exhaustive philological work in order to find, after having analysed all the existing copies and related documents, the latest, fullest text but that was still created during Bél’s lifetime and approved by him. Only this version is to be the basis of a text edition.

3. For the philological study it is necessary to know Bél’s network of relations, especially his correspondance with his acquaintances and the authorities. The correspondance is the only way to understand the function of each copy, to find out the authorship of the corrections they include and the persons collecting data on behalf of Bél, and also to learn the authorities’ censures to the description. The correspondance remained however unexplored and unedited for a very long period.

These obstructive factors only disappeared recently from the way of the edition. László Szelestei N. prepared the catalogue of Mátyás Bél’s manuscripts in 1984.10 11 Hence the vast and scattered mass of manuscripts became perspicuous and researchable. (Szelestei could not explore - due to reasons beyond his power - the documents kept in the Evangelical Lyceum of Pozsony. This work was accomplished by us in 2006.n) It was also László Szelestei N. who published in 1993 Mátyás Bel’s correspondance, that contains 919 documents. Consequently Bél’s collaborators, data collectors, his contact with authorities became known for future study.12 As far as the Notitias manuscripts’ identification and their philological research are concerned, I undertook to accomplish it in my PhD dissertation (defended in 2008) based on the catalogue and correspondance at disposal. This work consisted of the philological study of all the county descriptions (manuscripts and printed versions included) in order to make it possible to get the work’s major part that remained in manuscripts published.13 In our critical edition the introductions of the county descriptions presenting the creation history of the description, follow the same method as used in the dissertation, and they are based on, with some additions, the results of our research published in our dissertation. About the content and structure of these introductions we’ll write more in depth below.

II. The structure of the edition

After finishing our dissertation we decided to prepare the critical edition of the county descriptions remained in manuscripts, based on the results of the research up to this date. When planning the edition, however, we took great care to respect Bél’s original conceptions. We followed them regarding the county descriptions’ order of publishing and categorization, briefly in the matter of the structure of Notitia.

10 Szelestei 1984.

11 Tóth 2006.

12 Bél 1993.

13 Tóth 2007.