Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
Dénes Dienes: THE PROTESTANT SCHOOL IN THE 16TH CENTURY - The vague beginnings of Protestant schooling, 1538-1557
10 THE PROTESTANT SCHOOL IN THE 16TH CENTURY is from his biography that it can be clearly ascertained that poetics was already part of the curriculum and students were analyzing the Greek language and the works of the classical authors. FA1EKAS At. ó- iskolaépület TRÓJA I maminak udvartér felüli oldala. The school building in the The school building had apparently been originally located near the parish 16th century church. In 1567, however, there is mention of the “Lutheran School” being quite distant from it, beyond the town walls, functioning in the “monastery of nuns” opposite to the former Franciscan abbey which had been destroyed by Gábor Perényi,. The building in question could well have been the house of Beguines, which Dorottya Rozgonyi, widow of Imre Pálóczi, had had built around 1500 “with not minor expense and worthy appearance, out of stone - in fact, where it was necessary, eminent and artistically-carved stones - from its very foundations, and indeed handsomely”. It was located west of the convent belonging to the Clarisse and Franciscan Orders. It is interesting to note that, in the middle of the 18th century, corpses clothed in “Franciscan attire” were found beneath one of the buildings of the College, these likely being Beguines who were buried here. It is not known exactly when the school had moved to this property. The town fortifications, completed by 1541, integrated the area surrounding the church and, among other areas, also the local cemetery. It would seem that the parish school building had suffered a similar fate. The appropriate assumption here is that it was Péter Perényi’s decision to relocate the school. As a consequence, a new and special situation arose in that the traditionally physical proximity between the church, the school and the town was severed and the Protestant school found itself “at the outer edge” of the town. In any case, it is interesting to note that, in the subsequent decades, the school’s guardian was much more the patron landlord than the town itself. But once the school developed into a college, it itself became a small town within the town.
