Abstract » Vincze
Budapest 2010
Encyclopaedism, Pansophia, and Universal Communication, 1560–1670
Orsolya VINCZE
Reforming the Polity: Networks of Hungarian Heidelbergians and the Politics of Everyday Conduct
Political theorising in the Hungarian vernacular was born in the first decades of the seventeenth century in circles of Hungarian students studying at Heidelberg. This presentation looks at the context in which this literature emerged, and at the formative influence of the intellectual world of the Palatinate, as well as of the print medium on it.
Hungarian ‘Heidelbergians’ formed a distinct social group, indeed a network capable of exerting significant pressure to holders of political power and capable of reproducing themselves as a group. They were personalities with similar careers and interests, linked not only by their studies, but also origins and future careers. Their networks can best be mapped starting from a characteristic feature of early modern printed texts: the presence of numerous dedicatory and congratulatory poems. The importance of these paratextual elements lay in the names they carried and the links they signalled or established, associating the works with further, scholarly, or political authorities. They established the place of the author and his work among his fellow scholars, and acknowledged or tried to acquire patronage. Even the name of the printer was significant in this respect, informing the reader of the place of the book on the market.
The links and connections of the figures functioning as nodes in this network, like Albert Szenci Molnár, Georg Rem, Rudolph Goclenius Sr, or David Pareus were not only scholarly, but also political and diplomatic, as in the case of so many major brokers of influence and information of the early decades of the seventeenth century. The picture that emerges from mapping these connections also shows that the attraction of Heidelberg to students of different nationalities was not some sort of ‘Calvinist orthodoxy’, or, as Frances A. Yates put it in the case of young Comenius, the ‘great things of wonder’ forecast by the marriage of the Elector to the daughter of James I, customarily understood as hopes for a militant Calvinist policy, but the fact that it was a centre of further reformation. Reformers in Heidelberg, Herborn, and Hesse, princes, preachers, and academics assumed that reformation of faith must be followed by reformation of life; hence the necessity to reform education and the polity at large. Thus, the traditional genre of mirrors for princes was transformed into a conduct book literature. The Hungarian translations of Basilikon Doron, or the Royal Mirror partly written as a response to it, were no longer aimed at guiding and advising the prince, but strove to guide and advise a larger readership in different aspects of social, political, and even everyday life.
The emergence of a conduct-book literature, originating in the traditional genre of mirrors of princes, but aimed at society at large, was also connected to the widening of the reading public. This widening public was created and served by an increasing number of books printed in the vernacular, the elevation of which was programmatically sought by Molnár and his circles. Changes in the target audience impacted on the political languages these texts spoke and the substantive ideas they put forward. In the newly defined speech situations the primary addressee, the prince, could be shown the norms to be observed with reference to a public: with Füsüs’s Royal Mirror for example, authority, the final aim of political prudence, came to be equalled with good reputation. Hence the political significance of making the vernacular the language of learning, and making learning a central attribute of persons with public authority.
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