Notitia hungáriae novae historico geographica (Budapest, 2011)
BEVEZETÉS - A szöveg tipográfiája - Irodalomjegyzék és mutatók
32 INTRODUCTION presentation of the copy itself. In the case of the Chancellary’s revision we only made a separate presentation when it significantly influenced the content of the county description; otherwise they were treated together with the manuscript that had been sent to revision. When presenting each of the manuscripts we followed the same rule of examination. The meaning of numbers and lines is as follows: 1: The manuscript’s signature. 2:The title of the manuscript. (In some cases we gave a Latin title based on the content, or dealing with hypothetical copies, we invented a title, written in brackets.) 3: Physical characteristics. If the manuscript can be found in the catalogue prepared by László Szelestei N., we mainly kept his data (see Szelestei 1984). 4: The content of the manuscript. 5: Other characteristics: the identity of the person who made the manuscript, its role in the creation process (e.g. it is based on which antecedent copy, and it was prepared for whom); the examination of corrections and additions that it contains. 6: Dating of the manuscript. Naturally we followed the same procedure in the case of related documents (data collections, letters, etc.). 4. Summary In this chapter we reviewed the most important information about the whole of the county description. Firstly we enumerated the data providers, with the letter of their data collection in brackets (e. g- [Re]), or with the letter of the manuscript of the county description to which they are related (e. g. B). Then we added, what kind of official revision or correction the county description had gone through: we also marked here in brackets the manuscript that had been sent to the correction in question. It is very important that we suggested which copy to be used as the basis of future text editions (here as well we gave the letter sign of the manuscript, e. g. E). The suggested manuscript in all of the cases will be the latest one elaborated by Bél himself, that is the fullest version of the text accoding to our present knowledge after the reconstruction of the creation process. This manuscript is the basis of our text edition. After this we indicated if there is a translation of the county description (to Hungarian or to Slovak language equally). And finally we enlisted the literature about the county description. Principles of the text edition and text critical notes The texts of the county descriptions are published literatim. Exception to this rule is the initial u written as v and the intermittant v written as u: this can be very annoying for a reader nowadays therefore we did not respect it in our edition, in accordance with what recent articles suggest about the edition of neo-Latin source texts.31 We didn’t follow however these suggestions about the use of the letters i and j according to their pronunciation.32 It would then mean that in cases where the i is pronounced 31 Oborni 2000. 73.; Soós 2000. 86. 32 Oborni 2000. 73.; Soós 2000. 86. (This latter only suggests to use j in the edition when it also stands in the original.)
