Italian codices in Eötvös Loránd University Library, Budapest

Abstract

Eötvös Loránd University Library, which celebrates its 460th birthday this year, is one of the oldest continually operating public libraries in Hungary. The historical nature of its collection is primarily due to its continuous centuries-long operation, which is extremely rare in East-Central Europe. Furthermore, other significant factors behind the growth of its collection were the abolition of monasteries ordered by Joseph II, and a few truly generous donations. Among the latter the donation of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1877), which enriched the library’s collection with thirty-five codices, stands out. Most of these medieval manuscripts were taken to Istanbul as spoils of war during the Ottoman occupation of the Hungarian Kingdom in the 16-17th centuries. The majority of the codices “gifted back” by the Sultan in 1877 are of Italian origin, most of them being humanist manuscripts, and a dozen of them were part of the Bibliotheca Corvina, the famous collection of King Matthias I (1458-1490). They include four codices of the former collection of Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan (1450-1466). The vast majority of the forty-seven Italian medieval manuscripts of the University Library are in Latin; from among these, the autograph manuscript of Saint Bernardine of Siena is especially significant for Italians. The Dante Codex is the most famous of the four Italian-language codices but the others, a nautical handbook, an anthology of ethics, and a musicological work are also of interest. This study briefly presents each Italian medieval manuscript preserved in the Library of the Eötvös Loránd University, offering help for their further study by referring the readers to the most important secondary literature works discussing them, especially the ones written in languages of international circulation. The links to the digital versions of the discussed manuscripts available in the institutional repository of the library, namely EDIT are given, and, in case of the corvinas, the links to their description and digital copy in the Bibliotheca Corvina Virtualis operated by the Hungarian national library are included as well. Finally, the paper concludes by an excursus detailing what elements of the Italian book culture are includedinto the graduate curriculum of the programs offered by the Institute of Library and Information Science of Eötvös Loránd University. A subsidiary aim of the study is to encourage the intercultural research and professional relationships between Italian and Hungarian scholars of library and information science, which have already been boosted by the meetings between Italian and Hungarian librarians organized at the turn of the millennium.