(ELTE University, Budapest, 26-27 May)
Professors and students from several universities of Hungary gathered in the library of the Institute of Historical StudiesDepartment at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE, Budapest) for a two-day conference on various aspects of early modern history. This year’s conference was already the third event of the series, which professes a double aim. On the one hand, it seeks to give possibility for early modernist doctoral students of the country to present their research and to engage in fruitful discussions. The other aim is to prepare doctoral students for the tasks of organising scholarly conferences, since members of the organising committees have always been PhD students, supervised by a professor. This year, a clear tendency of opening up was detectable in various areas. It is the first time that the organisers came not only from ELTE, but from three universities: ELTE, Central European University (CEU, Budapest) and Pázmány Péter Catholic University (PPKE, Budapest). Not only did the organisers belong to different institutions, but the 21 participants as well: students arrived from five different universities, apart from those three already mentioned, from the universities of Miskolc (ME) and Szeged (SZTE), as well. The opening is also visible in terms of the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the conference series: the fields of research ranged from various branches of history (cultural, social, political etc.) to linguistic and literary studies. While the presentations evenly covered all three centuries (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) of the period, a remarkable tendency was the overwhelming majority of Hungarian/Habsburg-related research: most of the the 21 participants stayed on home-ground, and only a few of them dealt with the foreign relations of their Hungarian topics.
In his greeting remarks, Dr. Gábor Erdődy, vice-rector at ELTE University and head of the Doctoral School of History, emphasised that the diversity and high standard of the conference series have proven the existence of a thriving scholarly life and have also demonstrated to the public that humanities are able to produce valuable contributions to society. According to Erdődy, it is crucial to stand up for the utility of historical research in particular and of humanities in general, especially nowadays, when influential opinions to the contrary can be heard in both national and European politics. In support of his claim, that a degree in history is a competitive one, he stated that during the past 5 years 174 out of the 192 ELTE PhD graduates in history received a job within their own discipline. Those attending the conference hence had the opportunity to gain an insight into what is currently at stake in the research of early modern times.
A basic question which seems to preoccupy today’s young historians is that of continuity and rupture between the early modern and other periods. That is, essentially what was ‘early’ and what was ‘modern’ in those times? Tamás Szemethy (ELTE) for instance found peculiarity in the socio-economic strategies of the nobility in the eighteenth century, which, according to him can be characterised by patron-client relations. This relation is much looser than the senior-vassal feudal relations of earlier times were, but not as impersonal as the bureaucratic institutions about to be born towards the end of the same century. In a completely different field, Emese T. Ládonyi (ELTE) looked at the strategies of the high nobility in choosing midwives and nurses in the seventeenth century. Interpreting her findings in relation to Philippe Ariés’s assertion that real parental love was practically non-existent before the eighteenth century, she concluded that this was far from the case: the carefulness of the parents in choosing midwives and nurses, as well as in obtaining toys and other non-crucial objects for their offsprings shows that they did indeed love their children. A segment of the history of ‘science’ as we know it today was the topic of the talk given by Tibor Bodnár-Király (ELTE), who reconstructed how certain concepts (like descriptive versus practical knowledge or natural versus human sciences, etc.) interplayed in the eighteenth-century work of a Hungarian physician/natural philosopher who was ultimately striving to determine man’s place in the cosmos. Finally, Bálint Ugry (ELTE) dealt with the history of aesthetic vision: how did a noble’s servant in the seventeenth century perceive Florentine art? Strikingly for our twenty-first century values, Ugry claimed that travellers of the era in general were much more fascinated by a half-ready Medici chapel and its promised decoration than by the neighbouring chapel designed by Michelangelo himself. The Medicis were the rulers of the town, and their representation commanded more attention from contemporaries than the superb level of Michelangelo’s art.
The road and vehicles through which information travels between people lie at the core of the historian’s discipline. Understanding the factors (be they physical objects or human interests) which alter, distort, or to the contrary, preserve the contents of information means understanding a lot about how human culture works in general. This was proven by a number of presentations at the conference, as well. Krisztina Péter (ELTE) discussed the way in which a sixteenth-century London pamphlet-publisher compiled news about the war against the Ottomans. She mapped the information-grid as well as the publisher’s political interests which influenced the final outcome, which at times could result in grotesque situations, like news about the lack of oranges in the Ottoman army, preceding that concerning the signing of a peace treaty. János Szabados (SZTE) is also engaged in information history, and in his talk gave a close-up of the adventures of a royal diplomatic letter, which had a fairly rough way until it reached its addressee, the sultan. Szabados minutely reconstructed the story, and concluded that in the early modern age, even a small missing link (a letter carrier for instance) could delay serious diplomatic issues for months. Not news items, but images of women devouring children were at the focal point of Áron Bence’s (ELTE) presentation, who in his research is trying to expose how the concept of European witch and that of the New World cannibal affected one another in popular European imagination to form the figure of the children-kidnapping and -eating witch.
Another side to the ‘movement’ of concepts and ideas is the way in which they materialize: research into how different ideals and projects have been put into practice in history is yet another field where historians can contribute issues of general interest. Katalin Pataki (CEU) is researching the social impact of church reforms carried out at the end of the eighteenth century and inspired by the ideas of the religious Enlightenment. In her talk, she focused on the process of the dissolution of the monasteries and the life paths of Franciscan monks and found that 2/3 of the Franciscans were found to be appropriate for parish work, but only 40% of them were actually providing pastoral care for smaller settlements. Barnabás Szekér (ELTE) deals with the same period and strives to find out how the enlightened education reforms affected teaching orders. Processing the house economics of a Piarist school and friary, he found that in contrast to what one would expect, the reforms did not influence their financial situation; at the same time, he has to gather details about the inner life of such a community, which might prove to be crucial in his further research. Finally, Tímea Kardos (PPKE) examined the 1683 assembly convoked by Imre Thököly from a legal point of view in order to determine whether the name of ‘diet’ was applied justly for the assembly, or was it just an aspiration of the anti-Habsburg (kuruc) leader, and her results strongly point towards the latter option.
Other contributions showed that there are still lots of historical sources yet unknown for historical research. Interestingly, most such presentations were delivered by students of literary studies. The manuscript of a Hungarian noble, Mihály Verancsics from the time of the Ottoman conquest of Hungary discussed by György Palotás (SZTE) for instance sheds new and relatively unbiased light at the military and political events of the era. Novel information on the same period is promised by the processing of the personal correspondence (containing ca. 1300 letters) of a noble from the same family by Borbála Erzsébet Sörös (SZTE). Similarly, a personal correspondence lies in the focus of János M. Barta’s (ELTE) investigations, who this way managed to draw conclusions about the economic relations between patrons and their clients in the seventeenth century. Ágnes Dóbék (PPKE) talked about the substantial corpus of an eighteenth-century high-priest’s personal library which will allow insight not only into the intellectual influences which shaped the era’s high clergy, but for instance into the way people used books at the time. The said priest for example had a dozen French books, even though he did not even know the language: certain books were not meant to be read, but to convey meanings through their bare presence, as a means of representation.
Finally, some of the PhD students ventured into the fruitful border between literature and linguistics on the one hand and history on the other. Renáta Törtei (PPKE) described how the story of Imre Thököly, the seventeenth-century kuruc leader reached theatrical plays in the Spanish Kingdom and even appeared in Spanish children’s Christmas carols of the time. Also dealing with drama, Nándor Virovecz (ELTE) pointed out how members of the sixteenth-century highest Hungarian political elite engaged in writing a mocking comedy about one of their political opponents and how humour was thus used as a release valve for tensions. Balázs Illner (ME) examined a special type of source, sermons preached at the inauguration ceremonies of civic magistrates in the town of Sopron, and dissected the layers which make someone a good civic magistrate: loyalty to the king, Lutheran faith and the least tangible criterion of being a real Soproner local. On the other hand, cooperation between the disciplines of linguistics and history also promises to fertilize research. For Zsuzsanna Kocsis (ELTE) it can serve as a tool to identify authors of letters, even if they had their letters written by multiple notaries: their characteristic language use will hopefully betray them. Language use is the topic of Mónika Varga (ELTE) as well, who deals with witchcraft trials and tries to associate linguistic strategies and characteristics with the roles (victim, accused, witness, etc.) people assume in these trials. Finally, Lilla Egerer (ME) is interested in cognomens and the way they were chosen and deployed in the ardent religious debates of the seventeenth century.
Having listened to all these interesting talks given by young early modernists, what comes to mind as a general conclusion was formulated in the presentation given by Zoltán Erdős (ELTE), who discussed the way national memory was constructed by Puritan preachers in the seventeenth century. As he emphasised, history is not simply a collection of old stories, but a factor in the identity-formation of the future. The past is entangled with the present and the future with several ties. The Puritan rendering of history, which Erdős analysed, attests to this statement in an extreme form: for these preachers even the 1526 battle of Mohács, a decisive defeat from the Ottomans today generally seen as catastrophic could fulfil a positive role. They saw it from the viewpoint of sacred history, and since the Ottoman conquest weakened the rule of the Catholic monarchy and thereby contributed to the spread of Protestantism, God had to be thanked for it.
The exceptionally fluent and disciplined organisation made it possible to have enough time for reflections. The formal questions and especially the informal discussions following the sections were very lively, thanks not the least to the fair number of professors who attended at least parts of the conference. Next to additions and suggestions for further research directions, many questions dealt with pressing for a clearer formulation of the concepts and in relation to this, the need for attaching one’s own research to the already existing research as well as placing it on a firmer methodological ground. Especially frequent were questions concerning the continuity or discontinuity of certain concepts, social practices, or ideas.
In accordance with the traditions of the conference series, the organisers plan a conference volume containing the written format of the presentations.
For further information concerning the conference, please contact Professor Márta Vajnági (ELTE) at vajnagi.marta@btk.elte.hu.
Adam Mezes
CEU, Department of History