Esemény, biográfia, nyilvánosság. Adalékok egy 17. századi természetfeletti jelenség kortárs recepciója és a Báthory-klán biográfiájának összefüggései
Event, Biography, Public Sphere. Correlations between the Contemporary Reception of a Seventeenth-Century Supernatural Phenomenon and the Biographies

Summary/Abstract: As in the popular television show X-Files, ‚the truthis out there’ could be the motto for the narrative of the event analysed in this study: on a still and sunny day in the spring of 1605, several people alleged to have seen a miraculous celestial beam of light accompanied with a horrible explosion in the vicinity of the villages Apagy and Nagykálló in Szabolcs county. The event itself was recorded by three contemporary authors. Péter Alvinczi, a Calvinist minister “commuting” between Kassa and Nagyvárad; Máté Szepsi Laczkó, another Calvinist living in Erdőbénye, and later Sárospatak; and the Jesuit missionary Gergely Vásárhelyi, who was active in Upper Hungary and the Transdanubian region. The study primarily focuses on the types of text organised into a unit by an event (in this case the observation of a supernatural phenomenon) and the ways this text formulates its own context. Another question is how this event infiltrates the biography of an aristocratic family, specifically that of István Báthory, and the collective memory concerning the news of his death. The study also discusses the principles at work in the selection of news based on eyewitness accounts, and the ways these correspond with the authors’ narratives. How does the public sphere operate and how are the texts used as a representation of the authors’ own individual and group interests?

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