Petrőczi Éva: "Nagyságodnak alázatos lelki szolgája” Tanulmányok Medgyesi Pálról - Nemzet, egyház, művelődés 4. (Budapest - Debrecen, 2007)

An English and a Hungarian Anti-Episcopal Dialogue from the i6th-i7th centuries

An English and a Hungarian Anti-Episcopal Dialogue from the i6'k-iyrh centuries (A:

clergy whom it hoped to reform, and while those zealous men might at times exaggerate, they certainly at most painted a dark enough picture in unrelieved black.”8 *

After such a lengthy, but unavoidable introduction it is high time to have a look at the two Dialogues themselves. Without the smallest trace of an unhealthy national pride I have to announce: our Medgyesi’s work is more expressive and colourful, less monotonous and self-repetitive than Throckmorton’s. I am lucky enough to be familiar with the words of an American lady-scholar who was objective enough to recognize the usually higher artistic level of the continental Puritan writings and the lesser one of the Anglo-Saxon ones. She speaks only about Christ’s livelier and richer portraits in „our” works, but her words are true for other Puritan topics as well: “Students of English Puritanism have often remarked upon the small part which the person and humanity of Christ played in Puritan writings of the i6th-i7th centuries. Of Christ the redeemer and Mediator we hear much - but of the man, the babe in the manger... we hear remarkably little... the continental writing of the time on the life and personality of Christ seems to be so much livelier, so much richer...”9

From among the numerous Hungarian Christ-portraits let me mention here only one, an episode from István Komáromi Szvertán’s Whenever You Pray (Grosswardein-Nagyvárad, 1651) in which the Redeemer is not plainly sleeping in the middle of the stormy sea (the Genezareth), but he slumbers upon a „plumeau”, a traditional and usually huge plumed pillow used in Hungarian peasant households even nowadays. In other words: the author is putting Christ into typically Hungarian circumstances, in order to stress our belonging to him, our being his elected nation.10

Naturally, as far as the dramatic structure is concerned, the English Dialogue is much well-developed; it is quite natural as it could be nourished by the extremely fertile soil of English Elizabethan drama, while our Medgyesi had just a few Hungarian predecessors of religious school-drama. There is a very close relative of his and Throckmorton’s Dialogue in our literature, Michael Sztárai’s remarkable work, entitled A Mirrour of True Priesthood (1557-1559) which is not an anti-episcopal dramatic piece, but sometimes seriously, sometimes playfully deals with the double responsi8 ELTON, G. R. ibid. 407.

■> WHITE, Helen C.: English Devotional Literature (Prose), 1600-1640, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1931 (Studies in Language and Literature 29), 195.

10 In Hungarian: „Egykor esék mindnyájoknak illyen állapattyok; hogy mikor vélek Idvözitőnk a tengeren hajóba szállott volna, és ő a hajónak utoljában egy vánkoson elalutt volna...” KOMÁROMI SZVERTÁN, István: Mikoron imádkoztok..., Szenei Kertész Ábrahám nyomd., Váradon, 1651. (RMNy 2404.)

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