Petrőczi Éva: Holt költők társaságában. A Puritanizmuskutató Intézet és a Medgyesi Pál Puritán Kiskönyvtár emlékére - Nemzet, egyház, művelődés 9. (Sárospatak, 2014)
James I. and Hungary
PETRŐCZI ÉVA: HOLT KÖLTŐK TÁRSASÁGÁBAN entitled Anglican Reformation, English Revolution. 274 Szántó treats King James’s often-criticized faults, his hesitations, his fears and weaknesses with an unusually great understanding, looking upon them as the sad result of his tragic childhood, including the bestial “pedagogical” methods of his tutor, Buchanan, the Scottish psalmist. (An interesting checkpoint of our cultures again: Buchanan was one of the models of our greatest Renaissance poet, Bálint Balassi, when composing his own psalm-versions!) The second James-centred Hungarian book worth mentioning here is Emil Hargittay’s Gloria, Fama, Literatur a274 275 The author- a literary historian — deals with the history of the reception of king James’s Basilikon dóron, discussing it in the context of other royal conduct books of Europe, offering an overture to the next work, again by a historian, Bálint Radó, who - four years later - analyzed James’s life and authorial oeuvre as an example of “political theology”. As he formulated: “James didn’t hesitate to treat the political life, the political activities as a sort of “applied theology.”276 The next edition to deal with King James was published in 2006. It is his Demonology (Edinburg, 1597), carefully translated into Hungarian by Anita Kecskés.277 Here we can meet the occult self of the Christian ruler of England, in the dialogues of Epistemon and Philomates. Occultism was sweeping over 17th Europe, even in its protestant circles, in the form of millenary expectations, mysterious events - perfectly matching the local colour of this stormy era. The next work, partly dedicated to King James is Hanna Orsolya Vincze’s already quoted, mostly precious PhD dissertation (2008) from the Central European University. This very elaborate and versatile effort is one of the examples which prove that youngest generation of Hungarian scholars, wisely, diligently and seriously using their long stays abroad, (a privilege not given to our generation, to the children of the 1950’s!) appear now in “full armour” in the international “arena” of the European humanities. (We can’t be so naive as to risk the lovely, old-fashioned expression: “respublica litteraria”- though we’d like to. Vincze’s dissertation is a reading offered to the English-speaking world, but she published a chapter of it in her recent 274 Szántó György Tibor 2000,193-219. 275 Hargittay Emil 2001,39-49. 276 Radó Bálint 2005. 277 Jakab, 1.2006. 128
