Private Libraries in Hungary IV. 1552–1740

This volume contributes to our plan set up nearly 30 years ago to make available for research in one single corpus the indexes of all the private libraries of the two centuries after the Battle of Mohács. The contents of the present work reflect the panorama of sources for the history of reading in Early Modern Period Hungary, with nearly 120 book indexes from the 17^th-18^th centuries.

A new era of official literacy started when Hungary and Transylvania was taken back from the Ottoman Empire and became part of the Habsburg Monarchy. As the modernization plans for Hungary included the enhancement of official literacy, from then on, not only real estate, but also movable goods were systematically listed. As book collections grew larger, there was need of making inventory of them on a regular basis. No wonder that two thirds of the book indexes published here date from after 1720. We include several already well-known indexes to make available the sources of the same genre in the same series. This solution helps also the international research community to find documents that might not relate directly to their culture history, but  show the effects of their national culture in this part of Europe.

Following our general practice, we try and publish the documents with their original letters. Also the readings might be better than 20 years ago, as on the internet you can quickly identify the items and read scribbled-over text. As for the publication of notes, we wish to provide only the first information, and do not always expose the entire literature of the topic. While at the elaboration of a single index we always offer the most complete information possible, here we only publish a simple reading.

(Excerpt from the Preface by István Monok)