Magyarország egy elfeledett forrástípusban: tartománylisták a középkori Angliában
Hungary in a Neglected Source: Lists of Papal Provinces in Medieval England

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the study is to bring into the limelight a type of source that shows little textual variation and user interference across the dissemination process, and thus is generally not included among the usual sources of changing perceptions of the Kingdom of Hungary. Libri provinciales, lists of papal provinces, were in fact typically immutable documents used all over Latin Christendom for centuries. The English examples presented in this study, however, suggest that some of them reflect the practical knowledge that insular copyists possessed about medieval Hungary. The Appendix provides an overview of the relevant passages of four manuscripts. The lists reveal information about the relative geographical position and size of the Hungarian province in Christian Europe. Despite the obvious orthographical variation suggesting the scribes’ unfamiliarity with foreign placenames, the information about the Hungarian province seems to have remained relatively consistent and precise throughout repeated copying. Besides addressing the textual contexts, as well as the possible purpose and medieval use of this type of document, the study examines the idiosyncracies of two identifiable authors who included these lists in their works: Matthew Paris and Gervase of Tilbury. Both Matthew Paris’s and Gervase of Tilbury’s versions attest to an active authorial and editorial approach towards Libri provinciales as integral parts of their major works. On one hand, Matthew’s copy reveals an acute sense of the need to update and correct the traditional text by later generations. One the other hand, Gervase’s version, thus far never examined as a useful medieval English source about Hungary, is unique because it contains passages and reorganization of material not found elsewhere. It is one of the few surviving pieces of textual evidence of the precise and up-to-date nature of pragmatic knowledge of an English author about the relations between Slavonia and Hungary. The unique details of this rare example, as well as the number of other surviving manuscripts suggesting a relatively wide dissemination of these lists, shed light on the complexity of actual medieval English perceptions of Hungary. They offer an insight into pragmatic English knowledge and perceptions which seem to have been more informed than is usually reflected in historiography or other surviving sources often strongly anchored in traditional narratives and bound to the conventions of their genre.

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