Download PDF | Gábor Almási, Lav Šubaric - Latin at the Crossroads of Identity_ The Evolution of Linguistic Nationalism in the Kingdom of Hungary.
327 Pages
List of Contributors
Gabor Almasi
is an external research assistant at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies (Innsbruck) and senior researcher of the research group “Humanism in East Central Europe” (ELTE, Budapest). He obtained his PhD from Central European University (Budapest). His fields of interest include 15'>-17'b-century intellectual history, religious history, history of science, patriotism, and later nationalism. Among other publications, he is author of The Uses of Humanism: Andreas Dudith (1533-1589), Johannes Sambucus (1531-1584), and the East Central European Republic of Letters (Leiden 2009).
Per Pippin Aspaas
is a librarian and researcher at the University Library of Tromse. He studied Latin and Greek philology and defended his PhD at the University of Oslo (Maximilianus Hell [1720-1792] and the Eighteenth-Century Transits of Venus: A Study of Jesuit Science in Nordic and Central European Contexts). Among others he is the co-author of the book Geomagnetism by the North Pole, anno 1769: The Magnetic Observations of Maximilian Hell during his Venus Transit Expedition (Centaurus 49, no. 2, 2007).
Piroska V. Balogh
is a lecturer at the Institute of Hungarian Culture and Literature at the E6tvés Lorand University (ELTE), where she has obtained her PhD. She specializes in the cultural and educational history of 18tt—-19"t-century Hungary, in questions of neo-humanism and neo-Latin culture. She is the author of the monograph Ars scientiae. Kézelitések Schedius Lajos Janos tudomdnyos palydjanak dokumentumaihoz | Ars scientiae. An approach to the documents of Ludwig Johann Schedius’s scientific career] (Debrecen 2007). She has also prepared various critical editions of neo-Latin texts.
Henrik Hénich
is a PhD student at the history department of Eétvés Lorand University of Budapest (ELTE). He has studied the political languages of the late 18 and 19" century. His last paper (in Hungarian) was entitled “Aspects of the relation between language and national community as reflected in the idea of national decline at the end of the 18 c.” His Hungarian language doctoral dissertation The Uses of ‘Nation’: Fight for the Dominant National Interpretation in Late 18-century Hungary will be defended in 2015.
Laszlo Kontler
is a professor of the History Department and current pro-rector of the Central European University in Budapest. He graduated and obtained his PhD from the Eétvés Lorand University of Budapest. His main fields of interest are early modern intellectual history, the history of political thought, scientific knowledge production, and the history of the Enlightenment. He is an editorial committee member of the journal European Review of History and an advisory board member for a number of different journals. Among other publications, he is the author of the book Millennium in Central Europe: A History of Hungary (Basingstoke 2002).
Istvan Margocsy
is the head of department at the Institute of Hungarian Culture and Literature at the Eétvés Lorand University (ELTE). His studies and research comprise most aspects of the culture and literature of the 18tt—-19'" centuries, but he frequently publishes critiques of contemporary literature. Among others, he has published a monograph on the greatest poet of romanticism, Sandor Petéfi, Hungary’s ‘national poet, and several volumes of collected articles. His most recent volume (“... a férfikor nyardban...” [“...the summer of adulthood. ..”]) appeared in 2013 in Budapest.
Alexander Maxwell
completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin in 2003. He is a senior lecturer in history at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language, and Accidental Nationalism (London 2009), and Patriots Against Fashion: Clothing and Nationalism in Europe’s Age of Revolutions (Basingstoke 2014). He has published several works on Slavic linguistic nationalism, including an English translation of Jan Kollar’s book on Slavic Reciprocity. He has also written about nationalism in daily life, nationalism theory, and the history of pedagogy.
Ambrus Miskolczy
is a professor of the Department of Romanian Language and Culture at Eétvés Lorand University (ELTE), and the current head of the department. His interest ranges from subjects of Romanian-Transylvanian history to questions of modern intellectual history, nationalism, modernization, Enlightenment, the Age of Reform and the interpretation of important historical figures from the past. He has published more than 260 scholarly papers and 27 monographs. His monographic series on Ferenc Kazinczy appeared in four volumes from 2009-2010.
Levente Nagy is senior lecturer of the Department of Romanian Language and Culture at E6tvés Lorand University (ELTE ). His research has concerned different aspects of the Hungarian-Romanian cultural relationship in the 16*-19'* centuries with an emphasis on the Romanian Reformation and Romanian historical literature in the Latin language. His monographs have been dedicated to the question of the Reformation and the figure of Luigi Ferdinando Marsili.
Nenad Ristovic
is an assistant professor at the University of Belgrade, Department of Classics, where he completed his undergraduate (1994), graduate (1999) and doctoral degrees (2004). His field of interest includes the Christian reception of classical heritage, the classical tradition in Serbian literature and culture, Serbian literature in Latin, and the history of Serbian classical philology. His last book, Prirucnik iz retorike Jovana Raji¢a [The rhetorics textbook of Jovan Rajic] (2013), is a study, critical edition and translation of a neo-Latin manuscript from 1761/62. Among others he has contributed to The Eighteenth Century and the Habsburg Monarchy International Series, vol. 5, Encounters in Europe's Southeast (2012).
Andrea Seidler
is a professor at the Department for Finno-Ugrian Studies and dean of the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna. She has published extensively on multilingualism in 18t'—-19tb-century Hungary, the press in 18*+-century Austria and Hungary and descriptions of 18'>-century Hungary in travel literature. She directs several projects aiming at the digitalisation of sources on 18*?- to early 19**-century Hungary, especially the press. Among other publications she is author of Briefwechsel des Karl Gottlieb Windisch (Budapest 2008).
Teodora Shek Brnardi¢
is a Senior Research Assistant at the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb. She obtained her PhD at the Central European University. Her fields of interest are the intellectual and cultural history of the Enlightenment in Central Europe, the early modern history of political thought, and the general history of Christianity. She is author of the book Svijet Baltazara Adama Kréeli¢éa. Obrazovanje na razmedu tridentskoga katolicizma i katoli¢koga prosvjetiteljstva [The world of Baltazar Adam Kréeli¢. Education between Tridentine Catholicism and the Catholic Enlightenment] (Zagreb 2009).
Zyjezdana Sikiri¢ Assouline
is a university lecturer at the Department of History, University of Zagreb. She obtained her Mas from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and from the University of Zagreb, where she also received a PhD. Her research interest comprises Croatian socio-cultural history of the 18‘?—19'? centuries, urban history and women’s history. She is the author of the book Uobranu hrvatskih municipalnih prava ilatinskoga jezika—govorina Hrvatskom saboru 1832 [In defence of Croatian municipal rights and the Latin language] (Zagreb 2006).
Lav Subarié is a key researcher at Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies and a senior scientist at the Institute for Languages and Literatures, University of Innsbruck. He holds a PhD in Classical Philology from the University of Innsbruck. His scholarly interests include manuscript studies, medieval Latin and Neo-Latin studies. Recently, he has co-authored and edited Tyrolis Latina. Geschichte der Lateinischen Literatur in Tirol (Vienna and Cologne 2012).
Introduction
Gabor Almdsi and Lav Subarié
The life and works of Jan Amos Comenius remained part of the cultural heritage of several European countries, including the Kingdom of Hungary.! The great pedagogue arrived in Hungary in 1650 with the hope of finding the hero of his utopian dream of a Protestant victory over the Habsburgs. However, the target person, Zsigmond Rakéczi, the younger brother of the prince of Transylvania, died soon after, and Comenius left the country in 1654. As a kind of final admonition, he dedicated a short book, the Gentis felicitas, to the prince of Transylvania. By and large it was about the ways in which Hungary could become powerful in order to withstand the Habsburgs. In the first part of the work he diagnosed the problems of the country, then suggested some ways to deal with them. One of the problems Comenius diagnosed was multilingualism:
[Hungary] is not only inhabited by those of a Hunnic blood but also of the remnants of ancient peoples in great numbers (Slavic tribes), while it is evident that many crept into the country from other places: Germans, Ruthenians, Wallachs and even Turks. As a result they do not use the same language but at least five languages, which are entirely different from each other. There would hardly be more comprehension of one another than on the tower of Babel, if not for the medium of the common Latin (which is already the sixth completely different language), or [unless] people failed to learn another two, three or four languages, but neither of which correctly, as it happens. Such confusion of nations, languages and customs either leads to barbarism or smells of it; it obviously upsets common happiness.”
1 We sincerely thank Istvan Szijarto, Per Pippin Aspaas and Laszlé Kontler for their careful reading and useful comments on the draft paper. We also warmly thank our colleagues at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies for their support of this project. Special thanks go to Thomas Szerecz for his dedicated copy-editing.
2 “Non a solo Hunnorum sanguine habitari, multas superesse antiqui incolatus (Gentium Slavicarum) reliquias; multos item irrepsisse aliunde, Germanos, Rutenos, Walachos, adeoque Turcas, in evidenti est. Unde nec linguam unam incolae utuntur, sed ad minimum quinam, toto caelo ase invicem distante: ut alius alium non magis intelligat, quam in Turri Babel: nisi communi Latinam (quae jam sexta toto genere nova est) interprete, aut si quis duas, tres quatuorve addidicerit: et nullam recte, uti fieri solet. Quae gentium, linguarum, morum confusio, A symptom of this Babelian state, Comenius claimed, in a country where a “great, if not the greater part” of the land is inhabited by non-Magyars,? is the backwardness of education, with not even a single vernacular school in the whole kingdom—‘horrible to say, and [a fact] unheard of among Christians elsewhere.”* The advice of the Czech pedagogue was less substantial than his diagnosis. The problems created by multinationalism might be overcome if there is greater concord and learning: morum et linguarum cultura.®
While the Babelian chaos of languages had never been positively viewed in Christian history, and the ideal of a past proto-language (the Adamic language) had not been questioned until the end of the sixteenth century,® before the eighteenth century it was rarely regarded the problem of a state, that is, politics. An even earlier exception than Comenius is provided by the Catholic political-religious agent Kaspar Schoppe, who claimed linguistic homogeneity was desirable for a harmonic state. In a letter addressed to Emperor Ferdinand 11 after the Battle of White Mountain, Schoppe warned the victor that future rebellions among the Bohemians could only be avoided if he made sure that the dissimilitude between the Czechs and the Germans was reduced, culturally, legally and also linguistically.’
Undeniably, the similar attracts the similar, and it is rightly claimed that friendship is based on similitude, and to want and refuse the same is eventually believed to be friendship. Dissimilitude, on the other hand, even in minor things, usually creates discord in the mind and the will, so much so that in the same town merely the difference of the citizens’ location makes often the inhabitants of one side of the river quarrel with the faction of the other side.®
Hence legal, religious and linguistic similitude was the most desirable also between the Czechs and the Germans. And Schoppe advised that if Ferdinand changed in Bohemia only the language of the law courts and religious services to German, in a few years not even the traces of Sclavonismus would be apparent any more.°
While Schoppe, speaking at the beginning of the seventeenth century, sounds frighteningly modern to us, two centuries later similar claims already appear conventional. The process of vernacularisation and the coming of linguistic nationalism, which this volume investigates, ended in Hungary with increasingly radical claims from the part of Hungarians towards nonHungarian nationalities. From the end of the eighteenth century Hungarian estates urged the introduction (and to varying degree the enforcement) of the Hungarian language in any public forum where earlier the Latin language or local vernaculars ruled; in fact, in the 1830s even Hungarian language church service became a demand in nationalist discourse.!° By 1844, after a legal process of more than half a century which was heavily delayed by the Habsburg court, the official language of Hungary finally became Hungarian. Hungary was thus the last European country in which Latin lost its dominance in higher administration and education, together with the associated Kingdom of Croatia, where this dominance lasted until 1847. Although this legal and cultural process may appear rather slow (and late), in reality it was sudden and radical. Mentally, culturally and politically a new world was born in this half century, entirely replacing the old rule of Latin, which represented a remarkable cultural-political continuity going back to the Middle Ages. The study and cult of classical authors, the transmission of the Renaissance values of virtue and erudition, and the principle of imitation gave way to the study of the vernacular, an admiration for modern and original authors distinguished by their language, and the valuing of national origins.
Latin Hungary
While the challenge against the omnipresence of Latin rose almost everywhere in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century (in Hungary from the 1780s), the Kingdom of Hungary started from a different level of vernacular culture. To illustrate Hungary’s belatedness in vernacularisation, we may turn to a popular marker, bibliographical statistics." In France, the country that was leading in vernacularisation, the share of Latin publications stabilised around 20 per cent already in the seventeenth century, and it sank to 30 per cent also in Italy. The eighteenth century saw a steady decline everywhere, although the transition to the vernacular was neither linear nor uniform.! In Hungary this process was particularly segmented with a number of crises which still lack a comprehensive understanding (see Diagram 1).
After a relative boom of Hungarian prints in the late sixteenth century, the major part of the seventeenth century resulted in stagnation. Neither the reconquest of Ottoman Hungary had any influence on book production in the Hungarian language; quite the contrary, the greatest crisis came at the beginning of the eighteenth century. On the average, Latin remained at 48 per cent throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (with over 60 per cent in the first half of the eighteenth), and the balance of languages started radically changing only from the 1770s onwards.'*
Latinity was massively resistant to time also at the level of everyday com-
munication among certain groups of the society. The number of accounts and anecdotes on Hungary’s Latin-speaking population is impressive Characteristic of this type of story is the ploughing peasant who speaks a few words in Latin to the passer-by.'6 Several travellers noted the widespread use of Latin even among “coachmen, watermen and mean persons,””” or “millers and butchers.”!8 These seventeenth- and eighteenth-century anecdotes show that Latin could indeed function as a real medium of communication among the different nations of the country at a level that seemed odd to foreigners. They also reveal that local intellectuals were aware and proud of Hungary’s Latinity, even if complaining sometimes about its basic level (“Hussarenlatein”). The question of just how widespread and proficient everyday Latin knowledge was, has been investigated by Istvan Gyorgy Toth on the basis of archival material.!9 Toth studied two larger areas. While he could affirm that in areas where the population was mixed, Latin was often used as a common language, especially in parts of present-day Slovakia, in other regions of the country (west Hungary, for example), where ethnic boundaries were stiffer, the level of Latin knowledge was much lower. Here landless, impoverished noblemen would often lack the most basic Latin. In the county of Vas, as late as 1770, only every fifth schoolmaster knew Latin. It was then vainly prescribed in the Ratio educationis of 1777 that also the sons of village noblemen and more talented peasant boys should learn some Latin: there were apparently not enough qualified schoolmasters in the country. Still, many of the lower gentry pretended to know some Latin, since Latinising, even erroneously, was a sign of distinction.2° Toth suggests that the myth of Hungary’s Latinity should not be taken at face value, the ploughing peasant or the artisan who had some basic knowledge of Latin belonged to the group of exceptions; yet learned men, including clerics, wealthier noblemen and many of the soldiers and merchants, indeed understood and spoke Latin. Toth also suggests that the level and spread of Latinity was varying in time and space.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to map Latin teaching in the entire country throughout the eighteenth century.”! To be sure, secondary education was fully in Latin—the vernacular was ignored even as a medium for the teaching of Latin until the Ratio educationis of 1777—-and Latin education proved especially resistant to reform attempts even after 1790, when the first law concerning languages was made allowing the introduction of the Hungarian language in secondary and higher education for those who wished to study it.?2 The last bastion of Latin education was the University of Pest, where even in 1844, the closing date of Latin’s political-educational dominance, the university asked for a moratorium on switching to Hungarian in teaching.
While we lack more profound research on Latin education at lower levels, there is a detailed study on the presence of the Hungarian language in eighteenth-century schooling by Istvan Margoécsy.?? This study suggests that alongside Latin as a language of prestige, the status and attraction of the Hungarian language continuously grew throughout the century. Margécsy demonstrates that the Hungarian language was often associated with the nobility, which increasingly used it both privately and publicly. There were also a few ‘noble’ boarding schools that encouraged Hungarian conversation, which made them popular among non-Magyar noblemen.”* The ‘noble’ school of Levoca (Lécse/Leutschau) promoted the learning of three vernacular languages: Slovak (“useful for later life”), Hungarian (“the language of the nobility”) and German (“spoken in the cities”).25 In fact, in the eighteenth century the use of Hungarian was not uncommon in the lower house of the diet, and it appears that by 1764-65 (the last diet before 1790), Latin talks could be ridiculed.2® The rising status of the Hungarian in the eighteenth century meant that Latin as a
language of prestige acquired an important rival.
The Language Question Becomes Politicised
The increasing prestige of the Hungarian language was a smooth and prac-
tically invisible process as long as it remained apolitical. The turn happened
in 1784 when Emperor Joseph 11 made German the official language also in
Hungary, thus eventually in the entire Habsburg Monarchy.”’ In the introduc-
tion of the decree, Joseph 11 expressed his disdain for dead languages: The use of a dead language, such as Latin, in all affairs is most certainly a discredit to the enlightenment of any nation as it tacitly proves that the nation has either no proper mother tongue or no one is able to use it for writing and reading, that only the learned men, devoted to Latin studies, can express their ideas on paper, and that justice is administered and the nation is governed in a language that it does not even understand. The evidence is clear, since all cultured nations in Europe have already banned the Latin language from public affairs, and it retains its position only in Hungary and Poland.
In practice, Joseph’s language decree meant that the language of public administration, law courts and the national diets needed to switch to German within a few years. Further, entering public service, career promotion and even secondary education was now conditional on the knowledge of German.?9 While Joseph was driven by enlightened ideas, the hatred for provincial patriotism and the desire to better unite his empire (as he said he had no problem either with Latin, which he spoke, or with Hungarian, which was not a majority language), his initiative—realised with little success and withdrawn before his death—led to an explosion that radically reshaped cultural and political loyalties. The replacing of Latin with German was for no one, except for the emperor, a matter of communication or government. It was seen as a profoundly political move, a plain attempt at Germanisation, and thus an attack on the Hungarian nation (and culture), a ‘nation’ which was still comprised of a number of languages and ethnic groups joined together by historical, spatial, commercial and legal bonds. The estates were shocked, humiliated and outraged.?° Each county protested individually to the ruler in a humble but desperate letter. The county of Zagreb, for example, prayed to Joseph to mercifully cure the great wound “inflicted on their minds.”?! While 37 counties protested against German (and via German, against imagined Austrian and German public servants) and argued for keeping Latin as the language of tradition, law, liberties and privileges, there were 20 counties which incorporated into their protest also arguments for the Hungarian language. If the patria lingua, the father tongue (Latin), had to give place to a vernacular, it needed to be the “native Hungarian language,’ the “mother tongue of the kingdom.”*? This would also be the best way to make Hungary—which is a sovereign land and merits a sovereign language—equal to those cultured nations, which Joseph 11 has mentioned in the decree. The question of non-Magyar minorities was raised only by a very few counties (like that of Trencsény/Tren¢in, sk, or Bihar/Bihor, RO), which argued that the commoners, not speaking Hungarian, did not matter since they were excluded anyway from public affairs, that is, from law-making and office-holding.?%
The arguments used by the counties in 1784 against German and for Latin or Hungarian reappeared in the most varied configurations in the next 60 years. However, after 1790, the debate already concerned the Hungarian language, and the unity that the common defence of Latin brought about was gone for good. Language was not any more a problem of the privileged class of the nobility, it was now a cultural-political problem of the wider society; in fact, it developed a few years later into a problem of cultural-political identity, which we can increasingly call ‘national identity’ in the epoch that followed.
The Kingdom of Hungary: A Case Apart
What distinguished this vital cultural-political change in the Kingdom of Hungary was the country’s political system and social and ethnic situation. Whatever the real or fictional degree of its independence, as a matter of fact, Hungary was a part of the already highly complex Habsburg Monarchy. The rebellion of Ferenc Rakéczi (1703-1711), which took its toll on both sides, ultimately made clear that Hungary could not be integrated into the Habsburg Monarchy as Bohemia had been after 1620: its ‘customs and statutes’ were to be observed. In turn, Hungary would accept the ‘indivisible and inseparable unity’ of the Monarchy in the Pragmatic Sanction of 1723, and tolerate the fact that its ruler continued living in a capital ‘foreign’ to the country, ruling a court where Hungarians—i.e. inhabitants of Hungary—were always significantly underrepresented. While the language of the imperial court was officially German (in fact, it was multilingual), the official language of the Hungarian parliament, the diet, had been Latin before the later part of the eighteenth century, except for a few occasions and for Transylvania, where the language of the local diets had traditionally been Hungarian before the eighteenth century.34 Although Hungary was ‘indivisible and inseparable’ from the hereditary provinces, its ‘otherness’, in terms of law and administration, turned out to be unshakeable. All in all, Maria Theresa’s enlightened government, aiming at greater international competitiveness through by-passing the power of privileged groups, had little chance for success in Hungary.®° It did not help much that the empress, who realised with dismay that significant legal reforms could not be achieved with the estates, failed to convoke the diet after 1764-65, and Joseph 11, the uncrowned king, introduced radical reforms through royal decrees. From 1790 political reforms could be implemented only through never-ending parliamentary negotiations, which were centred around the grievances of the estates. Political discourse in the diet became focused on the ‘ancient constitution’ — the fundamental rules of political and social order.3® The continuous opposition of the Hungarian political bodies (most importantly the diet) to the politics of the Viennese court, the resentment to ‘foreign rule’, and the neverending bitterness over Hungary’s curtailed independence gave an extra political dimension to the Hungarian language movement. The Viennese court was probably right when it interpreted the ‘movement as a disguised path towards separatism.°” It was however wrong to see it unidimensionally, as merely a sign of separatism.
In the eighteenth century, political relations with the rest of the monarchy were as complex as they were within the composite state of Hungary itself. In the eighteenth century, the lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen meant in practice Hungary proper, Croatia, Transylvania and the port of Fiume/Rijeka (from 1779), as a corpus separatum. Transylvania was administered through its sovereign corporate bodies independently from Hungary, while the Banat of Temes (until 1779) and the military borderlands in Slavonia and Croatia were subordinated directly to the Military Council of the Viennese court. Although the nexus with Croatia—which was a kingdom with a separate diet, but was also represented in the Hungarian diet—went through considerable changes in the later part of the eighteenth century, its autonomy was not in question.3®
In such a complex political situation, one of the greatest forces providing coherence to the country was the estate of the nobility. The socially and culturally extremely heterogeneous nobility represented a kind of society within society. Its presence in Hungary was particularly strong both numerically and politically. The group of c. 350,000 noblemen and noblewomen (c. five per cent of the country’s population) was exceedingly segmented socially. While the tiny faction of the magnates, sitting in the upper house of the diet, formed a different class, also members of the gentry could vary largely in privileges. To be sure, even those who lived practically at the level of the serfs (more than a third of the nobles) shared the same historical-political consciousness and enjoyed theoretically the same corporate duties and privileges; most importantly the duty to provide personal military service and the theoretical privilege of tax exemptions (in practice their legal rights and privileges varied a great deal).3° The ‘constitution’ of the country—so many times evoked also in language debates—ensured the ‘liberties’ of the gentry (i-e. the natio Hungarica, sometimes also referred to as ‘the populus’) both towards the unprivileged serfs and the politically underrepresented citizenry of the free cities, and in the face of the ruler. While the ‘political nation’ meant the estates, that is, the nobility, the royal free cities and the Catholic clergy, in practice the cities were politically marginalised. The natio Hungarica had thus an exclusive meaning in several respects, serving the legitimising needs of the privileged class, just like the medieval ethnogenetic myth, which the gentry was so keen to propagate.*° Besides, in the European concert of nation-states the prestige and sovereignty of the realm was felt to depend on their mythical origins and historical merits.41 No wonder that the appropriation and redefinition of the concept of natio became one of the principal goals of the language movement.
Paradoxically, while Latin as the language of the elite, and the official language of the diet, the curia and higher administration, served the interests of the gentry for so many centuries and was a symbol of their collective identity, the gentry, which was overwhelmingly Magyar, increasingly favoured the Hungarian language as the language of communication. Using the Hungarian language in any communication relating to the diet was one of the major demands of the nobility from 1790, except for the magnates.*? At the same time, in advocating the Hungarian language the diet, which represented society so distortedly (both socially and ethnically), remained often blind to the rights and demands of national minorities.
Although Staatistik and Staatenkunde became increasingly part of political thinking and administration also in Hungary,** and the debate over the Hungarian language was often informed by statistical arguments, using contradictory demographical data,4* we may rightly suppose that the majority of the nobility saw the problem through the distorting prism of their estate. As proper statistics were largely missing, the actual ethnic proportion of the country may still be a question of discussion. The most reliable available work dates to 1843, which gives the following numbers: out of c. 13 million inhabitants, Magyars numbered c. 4.8 million, Romanians 2.2, Slovaks 1.7, Germans 1.3, Croats (including the group of Sokci) 1.3, Serbs 0.8, Ruthenians (Rusyns) 0.45, Jews 0.25.45
Unlike the major part of the nobility, members of the Viennese court were much more aware of the proper dimensions of multi-ethnicity. This was reflected also in Jozsef Urményi’s introduction to the Ratio educationis, which presented Hungary’s different nations, religions and subjects (legal statuses):
No one who is not a stranger to Hungarian affairs may doubt that in the kingdom and the provinces annexed to it one can distinguish, besides minor ones, altogether seven notable, rather numerous nations, which greatly differ from each other in their language. These are the properly said Hungarians, Germans, Slavs, Croats, Ruthenians, Illyrians and Wallachs, who all use their own language, different in many respects from each other.*®
In this social, ethnic and political situation, it is hardly surprising that the Hungarian language movement, so elemental to the growth of Hungarian literature and culture, soon became a political issue of major importance.
Competing National Identities
While Latin was embedded in the legal identity of the estates (including also the Catholic clergy), it was also integral to the ‘national identity’ of another supra-ethnic group, the vaguely defined group of the Hungari. These learned people, regardless of their ethnic and social status, identified themselves as members of the Hungarian nation on the basis of a territorial and often legalistic-historical identification with the body of the realm.*” By the end of the eighteenth century, ‘Hungarus patriotism’ had a history of more than two centuries: its characteristic representatives—like Matthias Bel (1684-1749) or Gergely Berzeviczy (1763-1822)—-came typically from the north of Hungary (present-day Slovakia), the eastern counties of Croatia and other parts and cities of the realm where multi-ethnic cultural exchange had long traditions. Hungarus identity could—in a varying degree—also entail identification with the kingdom’s dynastic identity, which was cultivated by the House of Austria with the backing of Catholic symbols and institutions.
These larger identity constructs—related to the use of the Latin language—were, of course, neither static nor mutually exclusive. They all could be embraced without discrepancies, and not even ethnic-linguistic identities were necessarily in disagreement with any of them: a Hungarus could feel loyal to the historical-territorial entity of the Kingdom of Hungary, to the ruling dynasty of the Habsburgs, to the ethnic group of Germans, Slovaks, etc., and to the Hungarian ‘noble nation’ Nevertheless, the earlier harmony between these cultural-political (‘national’) identities was rapidly dissolving at the end of the eighteenth century.*® In search of the lost harmony, some Hungarus intellectuals also would embrace in the early nineteenth century a kind of Magyar identity next to their ethnic Slovak, German, Croat, Romanian, Serbian or Ruthenian one.
What emerged during this process by the beginning of the nineteenth century—particularly among the Magyars—was the clear dominance of the ethnolinguistic identity over competing collective identities. Ethnolinguistic nationalism became the dominating “frame of vision and basis for individual and collective action.’49 Language choice was no more a matter of communication, as enlightened intellectuals wanted it, but was increasingly a question of identity.5° At stake was the making of a new ideology, that of a nation determined by language. The function of Latin as one of the focal points of the nobility’s collective identity, and at the same time a vehicle for integrating intellectuals into the higher echelons of society (being an integrative and exclusive force at the same time), had served the nobility and the mobility of society well for many centuries. However, by the end of the eighteenth century this was no longer the case and Hungarian already had greater integrative potential than Latin, while being exclusive in a different way. In answering the difficult question of why this happened and why so abruptly, one should keep the delicate social setting in mind. Obviously, enlightened noblemen had quite different expectations towards Hungarian as the vehicle of enlightened thought than the learned commoners, whose campaign for their mother tongue entailed the radical and immediate rise of their social-cultural prestige, since the Hungarian language was the field of their expertise; it was a new terrain of rivalry within the patriotic paradigm.*! At the same time, Hungarian could be promoted by the gentry of the counties—so proud of their Latin culture—for quite different reasons. One of them was certainly the hope of obtaining the positions of non-Magyars in public offices and the state administration. Yet, it was not all about rivalry for offices, as it would fail to explain why members of the gentry promoted Magyarisation when in theory they had counter-interests to raising the number of Hungarian speakers. It is perhaps right to point out that the ideology of language as the most important constituent of nationality kept people with diverse social-political agendas together. The language movement can thus be interpreted as an experimental field for the programme of the concordance of interests of the different social groups, which was the basis for later civil reforms concerning a free press, liberty of expression and the taxation of the nobility.52
To close our argument we take the examples of two learned men—the Hungarus scholar Lajos (Ludwig) Schedius (1768-1847) and the fervent nationalist Istvan Horvat (1784-1846)—in order to illustrate the complex ways the Latin language figured at the ‘crossroads of identity’ at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. These radically different intellectuals lived in the later phase of the language movement. They both supported the spread of Hungarian, but on very different grounds, and both used Latin in their communication although in rather different forms.
Born in the town of Gyér (Raab) in west Hungary, Schedius came from a German Lutheran patrician family with significant intellectual relatives and ancestors.°3? Among his teachers we find the great Hungarus scholar Marton Schwartner, famous for a statistical and geographical history of Hungary,°* and the Gottingen professor Christian Gottlob Heyne. Schedius was a versatile intellectual wholly committed to enlightened thought. Next to teaching aesthetics and Greek at the university, publishing German and Hungarian journals oriented at book culture and science, being interested in the education of children of any age, map-making, literary, social and cultural aspects of history, and hermeneutics, he was also a dedicated entrepreneur (e.g. publisher of journals, owner of a restaurant, renter of a mine, silkworm breeder, etc.) and engaged in different social charities. In his most important pedagogical work, the Systema rei scholasticae, which was a complex educational programme for Lutherans, Schedius demanded better infrastructure for the teaching of the Hungarian language and emphasised the need for Magyarisation (hungarizari), settling native Hungarian-speaking teachers of the language in nonMagyar areas too.°°
Unlike Schedius, Horvat was born into a poor but noble family in Székesfehérvar (central Hungary).°° His father was an artisan who died early, leaving behind nine children. Thanks to his talents, Horvat won a royal scholarship already in secondary school, which made his university studies in Pest possible. Among his teachers were Schwartner (whom he attacked later for not being patriotic enough) and Schedius. When after his studies Horvat applied for the chair of the Hungarian language at the university (a department established in 1800 but attracting only a couple of students), Schedius was one of his strongest supporters; he claimed the Hungarian language had no future if the job was not given to Horvat.5” However, Horvat was rejected and had to wait several years to enter the staff of the university, where he later taught, among others, diplomatics and Hungarian. Meanwhile, he worked as a home tutor and later secretary to the enlightened aristocrat, Lord Chief Justice Jozsef Urményi (responsible for the Ratio educationis of 1777), and served as the librarian of the later Széchényi Library. The leitmotif in Horvat’s intellectual activity was Hungarian nationalism, which he coupled with xenophobia against anything non-Magyar. Making the ethnic-linguistic principle central to his thinking and rhetoric became apparently integral to the way he carved out a place for himself between the university and the Magyar intellectual/gentry public. He avidly collected any bits of historical sources relating to the Magyar past, any document that supported the ethnogenetic myth of the nobility, but he was uninterested in offering broader historical analyses for this data. While Schedius taught and published in Latin and German, Horvat published mostly in Hungarian but gave his lectures mainly in Latin. When in 1841 the Council of the Lieutenancy made an inquiry among university professors about the introduction of the Hungarian language to university education, it was only the elderly Schedius who responded positively. He claimed that the language of education should switch to Hungarian as early as possible so that academic life could have a greater influence on public life, and the knowledge of Latin would cease to be ruined by low-level familiar usage. He believed that subjects like history, diplomatics and genealogy could be taught in Hungarian immediately.58 Unlike “the German Schedius,’ Horvat argued for keeping Latin, and opened the 1842/3 academic year with an oration in Latin. When in 1844 the language of teaching at the university was switched to Hungarian by the force of the law, Horvat protested that it was too early to abandon Latin in diplomatics, numismatics and genealogy.°?
Whereas Schedius was one of the last Hungarus intellectuals who could develop a harmony between his different identities and social-political loyalties, and preserve the enlightened attitude of the initiators of the language movement, Horvat was an opinion leader of the new generation of intellectuals for whom the choice of language was an ideological decision informed as much by enlightened concepts as by the social dimension of an emerging intellectual class. This new generation of intellectuals, on the one hand, had noble pretensions and happily identified with noble interpretations of past and present narratives of Magyardom and, on the other hand, were sociallypolitically frustrated and aimed at rewriting the elitist concept of the nation— deeply linked to the Latin language—in a way that could provide them greater prestige.
The language movement, which later turned into a bitter fight between Magyars and Croats, was closed around 1844. Higher education (except for a small number of grammar schools) changed to the Hungarian language and the language of law and all forms of official communication within Hungary became finally Hungarian, but Croats—despite the desperate demand of the Magyar gentry—were allowed to respond in Latin (though not in the diet), and continued using it in their parliament until 1847. In Transylvania, the Hungarian language movement was less vehement and the resistance of the Saxon population was more successful. When in 1847 the Transylvanian diet finally switched to Hungarian and the laws were published in Hungarian, the Saxons could keep German in their administrative bodies and were also provided an official German translation of the laws. Changes in higher education, which remained entirely in Latin, began only in the late 1840s.6°
Why This Book?
It is self-evident that language played a crucial role in the complex process of identity transformation outlined above. From the late eighteenth century on, language choice was not only a matter of communication, as the Enlightenment understood it, of conveying ideas and reaching the people, but increasingly the crucial element of cultural-political identity in the linguistically heterogeneous lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen.
As the core element of national identity based on ethnolinguistic principles, language has been already for a long time in the focus of separate national scholarly traditions. Research has concentrated on the history of respective language movements and the making of vernaculars into national languages. Viewed from a teleological perspective, these processes were perceived as heroic stories of national self-assertion. In this context, Latin was one-sidedly viewed as a problem, a retarding element on the road of national progress. Typically, the language question has been addressed in the literature either as an aspect of language reform, ranging from the problems of standardisation to the creation of a new, modernised vocabulary (investigated by historians of literature), or of political reform, the political movement that transformed the feudal societies of Hungary, Transylvania and Croatia into a modern state (which has been the field of ‘proper’ historians).
Beyond the confines of the national historiography, however, the general problem of language use did not garner the interest it deserved. Especially the Latin language, despite its obvious significance as a common element in all the different stories of changing national identities in the kingdom, has never been the subject of monographic or collected studies.
This volume aims to fill this gap by exploring the role of Latin in the process of the creation of national identities in Hungary, Transylvania and Croatia from a multidisciplinary perspective. With the participation of scholars of different disciplinary and national backgrounds, its goal is to explore the complex and dynamic relation between language and national identity at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century by placing the Latin language in the focal point. Moreover, concentrating on the changing status, socio-cultural and political significance of the Latin language offers an ideal platform for leaving the constraints of national historiographies behind and contributing in new ways to the understanding of the common pasts of the peoples of historical Hungary. We also hope that the better understanding of this critical period in the history of the Latin language may help us capture the reasons behind its enduring popularity as a medium of communication in early modern Europe.
Istvan Margocsy’s chapter presents the prehistory of language ideology in eighteenth-century Hungary. By following the long and slow change in the understanding of language, from a mere vehiculum for thoughts and communication to the most important characteristic of a nation, he sheds light on the ideological and practical conflicts over the use of language.
In his analysis of a Hungarian-language pamphlet from 1790, advocating the use of the mother tongue and abandonment of Latin, Henrik Hénich shows how the elements from the earlier discourses of collective identities were employed to ‘rewrite’ and thus create new political languages in the service of promoting the mother tongue from a reinterpreted ‘national’ perspective. His chapter demonstrates how a detailed analysis of political languages can provide us with an insight into how new ideologies were created and made victorious.
One phenomenon, which in itself is rarely examined but often cited in the context of the use of Latin as the neutral supra-ethnic language, is the so-called Hungarus consciousness. Ambrus Miskolczy attempts to answer the question, what kind of ‘national’ identity did the Hungari/Hungarian patriots of non-Magyar origin have, and shows how this identity related to other legalhistorical ‘national’ identities, in particular the nobility’s narrow concept of the nation (natio Hungarica). In explaining the complexities of Hungarus consciousness, his chapter presents the socio-cultural contexts in which defences of the Latin language were developed and expressed.
In the eighteenth century, Jesuit scholars were foremost among those who continued championing the cause of Latin in learned communication. Laszlo Kontler and Per Pippin Aspaas explore the changes in the status of Latin after the suppression of the Society of Jesus through the shifting positions taken by the famous Viennese astronomer Maximilian Hell SJ. Hell’s advocacy of Latin and strong Hungarus cultural allegiances were salient, but his reputation among the Hungarian political elite was ambivalent—partly because of his association with his assistant Janos Sajnovics’s work on a Hungarian and ‘Lappian’ linguistic kinship, which supposedly undermined that elite’s discourse of origin and social distinctiveness.
Education was from the very beginning one of the core components of the language question. The introduction of Hungarian as a subject in higher education, and later the replacement of Latin as the language of education, was never absent from the parliamentary debates from 1790 to the 1840s, but the framework for deliberations on the respective roles of Latin and the vernaculars was set much earlier. In her chapter, Teodora Shek Brnardié analyses the central text of the educational policy of the late eighteenth century, the Ratio educationis of 1777, which finally subordinated the school system to the state. This educational plan for the Kingdom of Hungary had a formative influence on the culture of the country, reaffirming the central role of Latin in education while at the same time promoting elementary education in different native languages. In contrast to the continuing humanistic tradition centred on the rhetorical values of Latin, the Ratio put the language firmly in service of Enlightenment ideals, shifting the focus from learning Latin to learning through Latin.
The creation of new national identities is inseparable from the emergence of a broader public sphere. New print media, journals and newspapers mobilised opinions on an unprecedented scale and prepared the ground for political demands. Andrea Seidler follows the general development of journalism in Hungary, its aims and its influence on national identity, from its origins as a Latin medium, to the dominance of German journals and newspapers, and the emergence of a press in the Hungarian language, which was both the consequence of the heightened sensibility for the vernacular and in the latter case a motor of further national aspirations. Building on a similar theme, yet concentrating solely on the Latin-language press, Piroska Balogh analyses how Latin could be put to different, even opposing uses, from the assertion of Hungarian constitutive independence to the creation of imperial community awareness, and from symbolising supra-ethnic Hungarus identity to propaganda of the Magyar national cause.
As the new language-based national identity became widespread among those of Magyar ethnicity, other language communities came under the increased pressure of the homogenising efforts of the Magyar national movement. The most notable resistance against such tendencies came from the associated Kingdom of Croatia. The Croatian nobility rallied behind the Latin language, protected by the traditional but increasingly contested legal framework of Croatian autonomy. Lav Subarié follows the change of attitudes towards Latin in Croatia from its first traumatic abolishment as an official language under Joseph 11 to its final replacement by the vernacular as a consequence of the Illyrian movement in 1847. He shows how the Latin language gradually turned from the cornerstone of the traditional legal identity of the Croatian nobility to a mere tactical device the new Slavic national movement used to stall Magyar aspirations. Zvjezdana Sikiri’s chapter concentrates on two 1832 speeches from the Croatian parliament, a pivotal year in the history of the language question in Croatia, of which one advocated Latin and rejected the introduction of Hungarian, and the other opposed the extension of civil rights to the Protestants in Croatia. In her analysis of these speeches, she reconstructs the essential traits of the Croatian feudal elite’s collective identity.
In contrast to Croats, the Slavs of northern Hungary, today Slovakia, had no legal stake in the political institutions of the kingdom. The Slavic literati reacted to the Magyar national movement partly with a strong but ineffective endorsement of Latin, and partly with a linguistic nationalism of their own. This nationalism, for which Latin provided an important medium, was not based on any political particularism, but on cultural pan-Slavism. In his chapter, Alexander Maxwell explores Slovak ideas of ‘the Slavic language,’ illustrating with three Latin texts from 1787, 1826 and 1847 the Slovak assumption that all Slavic vernaculars represent facets of one single language.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Latin was also used by those communities that had no distinct Latin cultural tradition of their own. Nenad Ristovic’s contribution examines the use of Latin among the Serbs, who accommodated to it after migration to the Habsburg-ruled lands in the late seventeenth century. While suspicious of Latin as the language of the proselytising Roman Church, they nevertheless introduced it into their educational system for practical reasons, both as a necessity in the Latin-dominated political environment and as a means to avoid stricter censorship of teaching in their religious schools. As a consequence, a distinct Serbian Latin culture developed. It reached its pinnacle at the time when, after overcoming their own linguistic dichotomy between the vernacular on the one side and the traditional literary languages like Church Slavonic or Slavonic-Serbian on the other, the Serbs’ national identity, earlier primarily defined by religious Orthodoxy, was undergoing a transformation to the ethnolinguistic one.
Another interesting case is the appropriation of Latin language and culture among the Romanians of Hungary and Transylvania, as examined by Levente Nagy. Spread through Greek Catholic schools established in the wake of the church union of 1697, Latin soon made an imprint on Romanian identity, as clerical intellectuals adopted the discourse on Roman origins and the autochthony of Romanians and subsequently tried to re-Latinise their culture by the means of language.
Taken together, these contributions illustrate the wide range of uses to which the old language of the Romans could be employed for social, political, cultural and economic purposes by different segments of society, and they conclusively dispose of the old notion of Latin’s one-dimensional role in the process of the transformation of collective identities.
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