Notitia hungáriae novae historico geographica (Budapest, 2012)
Veszprém vármegye
514 VESZPRÉM COUNTY IV. Brief review of the county description and principles of the text edition When editing Veszprém county’s description, we broke with the principle that only the best and most complete manuscript shall be taken into consideration in the edition, or that the previous manuscript shall be used only when the best manuscript shows omission, miswriting or corruption of the text etc. In the case of Veszprém we compared the “best manuscript” (D) from the beginning till the end with the draft by János Matolai that is certainly the earliest version (A) and we indicated the differences of the two texts in every case. We published the variants of Matolai’s manuscript in notes, furthermore when text D showed evident corruption, we corrected the base text using Matolai’s version. We typeset in s t r e t c h e d the supplements of text D that is the parts that originate not from Matolai but are later additions. This time consuming task was necessary from many points of view. Firstly we wished to indicate by it that in the case of Veszprém - besides some other counties - Matolai is to be considered as author rather than Bél. It is evident from the fact, that we had to stretch the text only a few times: apart from some personal memories (such as the description of the winter fishing on Balaton) or some other additions, corrections, Bél hardly modified the text. It is all the more interesting to see the parts where Bél felt necessary to make a correction or a supplement (e.g. quoting Anonymus, the medieval historiographer in the history of the county). Later, however, an uncalled “actualiser” of the text appears in the person of Ferenc Szarka, copyist of manuscript D, who “updated” the data concerning the bishop of Veszprém or the Batthyány domains according to the situation in 1772. In case of his additions the stretched typesetting was also useful, thus discerning those parts from the original text. Naturally we always indicated in notes that the addition was Szarka’s, not Bél’s. The comparison of the two texts was also necessary because Matolai’s version also contains supplements compared to text D, that were erased later by supposedly Bél (or Szarka?). Some of these parts contain data of first importance e.g. about the estates and landlords that were out of date by Bél’s (or Szarka’s) time. Many times Matolai named a certain individual as lord of a village but in text D at the same point only the family’s name can be read or in some cases a different family’s name is given that must be deliberate correction by Bél or eventually Szarka. Besides Matolai wrote references e.g. for the economical or denominational situations of the county that lack in manuscript D, with apparent good reason. Matolai’s another particularity is to indicate in many cases when a village was re-settled after the Turk invasion - e.g. “five years ago” - but this data was unnecessary for the later editor (Bél or eventually Szarka), therefore it was consequently rewritten giving an undefined numeral instead of a precise date (usually using “a few”, aliquot). Since we know that Matolai’s data collecting trip happened in 1731 (and supposedly he prepared the manuscript in the same year), we can easily count the exact year of the re-settlement. We published these supplements by Matolai in text-critical notes. Finally the collation proved also extremely useful, because there is a multitude of text corruptions in manuscript D - partly by Szarka’s fault, partly due to the damaged state of the lost manuscript (c) he copied. However, those corruptions could be corrected by the means of manuscript A (especially so because the content of the text hardly changed).19 The corrupted forms are naturally given in notes. The margin notes of manuscript D are incomplete and rudimentary, consequently synopses (brief content descriptions) are rare to spot, mostly lacking. Furthermore the text is not formatted, meaning that with some exceptions the proper names, quotes are not underlined as they usually are in the copies made by Bél’s scribes. Naturally there is no header and the table of road network is also missing at the end of the description. This can be only partly Szarka’s fault, it is more 19 Unfortunately the Hungarian translator did not collate the two texts, therefore the corruptions many times “derailed” the translation that is not free from grave errors anyway. Cf. Bél 1989.
