Notitia hungáriae novae historico geographica (Budapest, 2012)
Előszó
PREFACE 15 Matolai; the other reason being that so we could explore the parts really originating from Bél. From the collation it is clear that the description in its remaining state differs only insignificantly from the draft by Matolai, therefore the author in this case rather seems to be János Matolai.5 Leading indicates where Bél completed the text himself compared to the early draft (about that learn more in our introduction written to the description). We also indicated with leading if the text contains another late completion originating from somebody else (not Bél), thinking about the above mentioned insertions by Szarka. Both Veszprém’s and Zala’s county description contains this kind of insertions: we comment them in notes where we explain from which obvious traces one can know for sure that these are interpolations by the copyist. There is a part in Vas county’s description - near 1/6 part of the work - that does not originate from Bél but contains the additions by the Chancellary, although it is fallaciously melted in the manuscript because of the identical handwriting of the posterior copyist. Since it is completely obvious that Bél is not the author of this part (we found the original of the Chancellary’s observations) we indicated this fact by setting it in a form different from Bél’s texts - not by leading, which would have hardly been practical with a text of this length, but with smaller font size. Since Bél probably did not format this text - only the copyist matched it with the original text - it was an option to drop it entirely, but we did not want to rob the reader from the rich source of data that became part of the description’s manuscript tradition anyway thanks to the copyist (it can also be read in the translation of Vas county). We found the last version of the description of Sopron county, corrected by Bél in 1749, more precisely the transcript of its certain parts, in the manuscript of the jurist György Gyurikovits prepared in 1822, that were compiled from the different manuscripts of the description. The differing parts or the supplements of this last version are published in a separate appendix after the county description. As seen from the above, in spite of the unified principles we emphasise, it occurs often that a decription’s text is so peculiar that it makes necessary to find unique solutions. Therefore we introduced a new chapter in the introduction titled “short presentation of the description and principles of the text edition” that comes before the summary. In here we explain in detail how the edition of the actual description is different from others, what kind of problems occured during the edition process, and how we solved them. Also we give a short presentation of the description in the said chapter, where we treat the main characteristics of the text, the question of the authorship, the relationship of this description to the whole of the Notitia, as well as pointing out the most interesting, the most valuable parts of the text for future research. The principles of editing the personal and geographical index remain the same. The geographical index changes (for the better) in one respect: we tried to identify not only the names of the settlements, but also the names of rivers, hills etc. that means that we put not only their grammatical forms used by Bél into the index (as we did in the first volume), but also their official name. The number of abbreviations used in the geographical index grew as well: we had to introduce the abbreviation praed. {praedium, abandoned village with his territory) that had not yet been necessary in the first volume when publishing Árva and Trencsén counties. For the making of the indexes we used - understandably - partly different aids than for the first volume. We enlisted those in the prefaces before the indexes. About the content of the county descriptions we wrote more in depth in the inserted new chapter of the introductions. We only remark here that all of the descriptions offer many useful material for the researcher: Sopron county’s description mainly with its general part and the presentation of the city of Sopron, the description of Vas county with the review of the cities and the data collection by the Chancellary regarding the settlements, and Veszprém with its thourough description of the villages, praedia, domains. Only Zala county’s description is rather poor; however, we would like to mention, that Csáktornya disctrict, at least its general presentation is worth the attention of researchers. Beside the above, Sopron’s, Vas's and Zala’s descriptions are significant from a historiographical point of view, because in them Bél prepared real “monographies” about histories of certain castles, cities and notable aristoctratic families. 5 About János Matolai’s role in the preparation of Notitia see Tóth 2007a I. 74-86. Also see our introduction for the description of Veszprém county.
