Date:
Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm
The Jesuit contribution to the long-held belief that Magyars were descended from the Huns was shaped by the inter-confessional rivalries in the Danube Basin during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and also by Jesuit contributions in drama and historiography. Yet lack of knowledge of comparative linguistics and the overriding Jesuit drive to identify equivalences across cultures also played major roles. Jesuit historians such as Katona István however also recognized the weaknesses in earlier Jesuit arguments for the Hun-Hungarian connection, an idea that continued in popularity for more than a century after the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773.