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Research Interests: History and Scholarship
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Samuel Literati Nemes (1794-1842), a well known Hungarian antiquarian, was paradoxically at the same time a peculiar, almost a double personality, and a typical representative of his age. Besides a large number of authentic antiquities,... more
Samuel Literati Nemes (1794-1842), a well known Hungarian antiquarian, was paradoxically at the same time a peculiar, almost a double personality, and a typical representative of his age. Besides a large number of authentic antiquities, however, he also sold a few pseudo-Hungarian "literary monuments", causing no little puzzlement and unrest in philologist circles. With this "double agency" Literati was a typical person of those decades of the nineteenth century when many literary monuments turned up and enriched Hungarian historiography with the earliest sources of national history. And when pseudo-historical forgeries, never existed writings dubious ancient objects and invented myths initiated first enthusiasm, and later disappointment among the historians increasingly sensitive towards linguistic and philological arguments. According to those who believe in its authenticity, it contains a prayer to God, praying for the pope, for the Christians, and against the participants of the eleventh century Hungarian pagan uprisings. Keywords: double agency; God; Hungarian antiquarian; nineteenth century; pope; pseudo-historical forgeries; Samuel Literati Nemes
Research Interests: Art and Middle Ages
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Abstract The Codex of Rohonc is a lengthy handwritten book filled with unknown sign-strings and more than 80 seemingly biblical illustrations. Nothing is known about the provenance of the manuscript; its Hungarian or even East-Central... more
Abstract The Codex of Rohonc is a lengthy handwritten book filled with unknown sign-strings and more than 80 seemingly biblical illustrations. Nothing is known about the provenance of the manuscript; its Hungarian or even East-Central European origin is possible but not certain. The initial enthusiasm of nineteenth-century Hungarian scholars for the supposedly Early Hungarian script was soon followed by disappointment, and late nineteenth-century scholarship came to the conclusion that the codex was a forgery. This conclusion, however, seems fairly implausible today in light of historical evidence. If the text of the Rohonc codex is not a hoax, it must be a consciously encoded or enciphered text. In theory, it may be (1) a cipher, (2) a shorthand system, or (3) an artificial language, and these possibilities are systematically assessed in the article with the help of historical analogies.