Apor Codex

The new edition of the Apor Codex is published as the volume No. 33. of the Old Hungarian Codices series. It was preceded by the great work of rescue carried out at National Széchényi Library to restore the severely deteriorated paper codex, a cherished treasure of the Sekler National Museum in Sepsiszentgyörgy. The codex, that occupied a special place in the award-winning Hungarian Language Relics exhibition of NSZL in 2009, had to be first fully restored, and only then it was possible to start the scholarly work on this critical edition and to-the-letter transcript of the facsimile accompanied by a rich set of annotations.

The preface explains the series of questions related to language relics, from the aspects of codicology, and the history of language, literature, and liturgy. This complex approach casts new light on various historical aspects of the Apor Codex. The most notable momentum about the codex that consists of three independent manuscripts is the first Hungarian translation of the Book of Psalms. It happens to be part of the same text tradition, other elements of which have been preserved by books of the Old Testament included in the Vienna Codex and by the four gospels which can be read in the Codex of Munich. Together, they make up the so-called Hussite Bible raising a plethora of questions which have not been answered until today.

Apor Codex is a joint publication of the Sekler National Museum in Sepsiszentgyörgy, National Széchényi Library and the Institute of Hungarian Linguistics and Finno-Ugric Studies of Eötvös Loránd University.

The volume is accompanied by a DVD comprising a digitized copy of the codex.