The former Jesuits Adam František Kollár and György Pray each devoted much of their careers to work in libraries; thereby contributing to the literary and scholarly culture of the eastern Habsburg lands during the second half of the eighteenth century. Kollár, who left the Jesuits early in his career, authored works defending the rights of the Hungarian crown, and chronicled the history of the Rusyn people, ultimately achieved an international reputation as a scholar, coining the term ethnologia. Pray is remembered for his discovery of the oldest written example of the Hungarian language, his extensive historical publications, and for his role, following the papal suppression of 1773, as “Historiographus Hungariae” (Hungary’s hagiographer). The impact of these scholarly efforts by these former Jesuits was a rich and enduring foundation upon which later Hungarian historiography and library science would be based.
The composition will be to see with the sight of imagination the corporeal place where the thing is found which I want to contemplate. Jesuits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-even those living relatively closely to Muslim lands-often had no personal knowledge of Muslims, and yet the figure of the Muslim loomed large in the baroque Jesuit imagination. Because Jesuit formation involves the visualization of events and persons never seen, Jesuits of this period were in a special position to construct an imaginary Muslim, which they derived from translations of the Qur'an, from artworks, including book illustrations, and from the patterns and symbolism of Jesuit emblematics. This essay explores how baroque Jesuit visualization of the Muslim body was shaped by these factors, and also by other Europe-wide phenomena such as turcica literature.Key words: Jesuits; Barroque; imagination; Turkish literature.Los jesuitas de los siglos XVII y XVIII, incluso los que vivían relativamente cerca a tierras islámicas, no tenían a menudo un conocimiento personal de los musulmanes. Sin embargo, la figura del musulmán fue cobrando mucha importancia en el imaginario jesuita del Barroco. Puesto que la formación jesuita consistía en la visualización de los eventos y las personas, aunque sin haber sido vistas, los jesuitas de este período se encontraban en una situación muy especial para la construcción de un Musulmán imaginario, tomado de las traducciones del Corán, de obras de arte, incluyendo ilustraciones de libros, y de los patrones y símbolos de los emblemas jesuitas. Este ensayo explora cómo la visualización del cuerpo del musulmán en el barroco jesuita fue influida por estos factores, y también por otros fenómenos surgidos del ámbito europeo, como la literatura turca.
Péter Pázmány (1570–1636) was one of the most significant personalities in early modern Hungarian history. Born a Protestant, Pázmány converted to Catholicism while a student and then became a Jesuit. Despite the Society’s requirement of vows from its members that excluded the possibility of holding high ecclesiastical office, Pázmány became provost of Turóc (a small church benefice in northern Hungary) and shortly thereafter archbishop of Esztergom and primate of Hungary. His tenure was marked by ecclesiastical reform and multiple educational projects of which the most notable was the founding of a university in Nagyszombat (Trnava). He was also the author of influential devotional and polemical works in the Hungarian vernacular. Pázmány’s legacy as a preserver and promoter of a “civilization” and a creed both Christian and European and of a culture distinctly Hungarian endures, as does his reputation as a master and shaper of Hungarian prose.
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