A Breakthrough in Research Following the Digitisation of a Codex Page

A conversation with Iván Horváth, professor of literary history at ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University), about his own research and about how the digitisation of our cultural assets and making them accessible affects academic life.

Since when have we known that the earliest known Hungarian poem, the Old Hungarian Lament of Mary, lies hidden in the Leuven Codex?

It was discovered by chance in 1922. We owe it to the fact that the library of the Catholic University of Leuven was hit in the First World War – not the library building itself, the gunners were careful about that, but the building to which the books had been evacuated. After the war the German state, obliged to pay reparations, bought up rare books from antiquarians; among other things they purchased the codex in which the Old Hungarian Lament of Mary can be read. Franz Babinger, a Slavist and Turkologist and a member of the reparations commission, discovered that a Hungarian-language text could be read in the codex. Then came the Second World War, and this time the gunners were not careful. The building of the Leuven university library was also damaged, but luckily by then the most valuable items had already been walled up. The codex remained intact.

What an adventurous beginning! And where is the codex today?

It is in the National Széchényi Library, since in the early eighties it was exchanged for a sizeable compensation. I would add that if the codex had stayed in Leuven, it would have been on the internet long ago, and anyone could access it, we Hungarians too. In Belgium, digitisation practice is democratic. When I was working on a digitally published codex of the Royal Library in Brussels, I noticed that a page was missing. I wrote to the library. By return of post, amid great thanks, they sent the photograph of the missing page, and then the correction appeared on the internet as well.

But I understand that the Leuven Codex has already been digitised...

Yes, the digitisation was done long ago, but for some reason the codex has not been published. The even older Pray Codex, containing the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, on the other hand, is online in the excellent Hungarian Electronic Library (MEK) of the National Széchényi Library. For the time being the library's practice is to publish electronically the quality that the average user needs, and the quality required for printing is supplied for money. The Pray Codex is a codex that attracts great foreign interest – not because of the Funeral Sermon in it, but because many believe that the earliest depiction of the Shroud of Turin can be seen in it.

When did the digitised Pray Codex become available to the general public?

A few years ago, and perhaps at my very request. The rapid surge of scholarly interest shows that it has been put on the internet. Previously the codex was researched almost by way of initiation, and mainly Catholic priests dealt with it. This unfortunately also made the main topics of debate somewhat one-sided. (The Benedictine monks claimed that the codex was a Benedictine compilation, and the secular priests that it was compiled by secular priests.) A thorough knowledge of the history of religious practice is of course indispensable, after all the Pray Codex is a service book made for churches of the Árpád era. I joined forces with Miklós Földváry (ELTE Research Group on Liturgical History), and the codex will finally be published in print in 2020 – 250 years after its discovery.

But you also raised entirely new possibilities in connection with the Leuven Codex. Could you summarise your insights regarding the Old Hungarian Lament of Mary?

Until now the assumption was that the text of the Old Hungarian Lament of Mary known to us is a beautiful but fragmentary text, a very poor copy, full of errors, even with swapped stanzas. Linguists date the composition of the text 50 years earlier than when it was written into the codex. There was also agreement that the author compiled – that is, pilfered – the poem by the method customary at the time from the ocean of medieval religious poetry. No one regarded it as a composed work in the form in which we know it.

If we turn the arsenal of textology on the text, we find that the textual errors point not to a copyist but to an author. (They are of the same kind as the ones we make while composing.) True, he very often got the order of the letters wrong, evidently because, unlike us, he never learned to write Hungarian, and probably never saw a Hungarian text before he himself set his Lament of Mary down on parchment. It is thus probable that this is an authorial manuscript. Moreover the authorial manuscript of a poem that is superbly, tautly composed and has a surprisingly complex stanza structure. Not only is the work's verse form closed, mixing the Latin sequence with vernacular models, it is also French in character. Like most of the Dominican sermons of the time, it follows the compulsory rhetoric of the lectures at the University of Paris, and indeed does not lack the philosophical character of “Thoughts in the Library” (Gondolatok a könyvtárban) or “Consciousness” (Eszmélet). (It takes a stand on one of the important philosophical questions of the age, the 13th century, the so-called debate on universals, and uses concepts of the Augustinian theory of signs.)

Why did a Dominican friar write a poem in Hungarian? And why did he write it down?

The Dominican order, like the Franciscan, was created because priests could not preach. They lacked the intellectual preparation for it. These were propertyless, mendicant orders. Their houses were established in towns. By the quality of their sermons the friars got their audience to throw enough money into the collection box. The Dominicans represented an outstanding intellectual level; the most famous teacher of the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, was a Dominican friar. This may explain the quality of the Old Hungarian Lament of Mary. And also that at the time there was not yet a reading public demanding Hungarian-language works. Consequently there was no provincialism either. In the absence of a Hungarian tradition, writers could only fit into the European tradition. This dazzlingly brilliant period of literary history recalls the ideal, imaginary homeland of the unnamed friend of Péter Esterházy: “it would be like Tuscany, where the English would live and speak Hungarian.”

Edit Madas observed the rule that the surviving Hungarian texts of the first centuries are all connected to the delivery of sermons: this genre had to be practised in the vernacular. Obviously our Lament of Mary is no exception. According to András Vizkelety's hypothesis, the copyist – who in my view is more than that: the author – used the poem in a sermon intended for Dominican nuns.

The Dominican nuns did not know Latin, so the sermon was delivered in Hungarian with them. It is generally true that the emergence of Hungarian-language literature is owed in large part to female readers, since they did not receive an education enabling them to understand Latin texts, yet they had a need for reading in their mother tongue.

What role did digitisation play in your research?

As an adviser to the Library I met Tripont Kft., because they have a long-standing ambition for quality library digitisation. A test shot is worth more than the most eloquent specification. I was curious how much information we researchers can extract from a shot made with a truly state-of-the-art machine. (I'm not a complete layman myself. Literary scholars who prepare critical editions sometimes make use of my expertise as a manuscript photographer. In analogue times I used a Nikon F5 and a Linhof Technika 70, then a Nikon D70, then a D700, but a few years ago I got too old for lugging the Linhof repro stand around.) The page on which the Old Hungarian Lament of Mary is found we photographed in the Manuscript Collection of the National Széchényi Library, in the presence of Ferenc Földesi, director of special collections, under the direction of Péter Peti, with Tripont's Phase One XF camera and an 80-megapixel digital back. Moreover, accommodating that eccentricity of mine, we photographed in minimal light, with longer exposures, since the earliest language records are relics. (The master photographer of the catalogue of the wonderful 2009 exhibition of language records used powerful flash light.) The pictures turned out excellent even so, shot in semi-darkness. Especially when Péter Peti boosted the contrast with the Capture One software...

It should be noted that the small-format Leuven Codex was originally in two volumes, and the Lament of Mary was entered at the end of the first, still unbound book, on the last page. This page lay on the monk's palm during use and, as András Vizkelety established, probably became somewhat greasy already when the poem was entered. The oak-gall ink perhaps did not diffuse deeply enough into the parchment to begin with. It is also possible that only later use wore the text away. At any rate, the situation is that most of the text is extremely faint and hard to read. The contrast-enhanced, enlarged photograph shows better than the original the little dots and strokes (virgulae) with which the scribe generally marked stanza and line boundaries, so the photograph contributed to our recognising the complex metrical structure. We owe several details not noticed until now to the new photograph, for which I hereby express my thanks.

Author: Boglárka Cziglényi