Possibilities and Results in Medieval Hungarian University History Research – with A Prosopographical Focus

Abstract

In my paper, I will demonstrate, what kind of literature and contemporary sources are available to explore the medieval Hungarian Peregrination. In the current state, we know about 12800 enrolments between 1100 and 1526, and we were able to clarify their career prospects after their studies by nearly 20%. Thanks to systematic research, this number will certainly increase. Although most graduate students did not use their degrees after their studies, prosopographical research has many other ways to reveal their identities and postgraduate career. Various inscriptions in university sources make it possible to identify the students, in connection with the reviving ecclesiastical and secular archontology research in the previous decades. Charters of the Hungarian National Archives before 1526 (more than 200 thousand pieces) are available online for every researcher. Short extracts were also prepared for a significant part of them, which makes easier the research in the beginning. On the other hand, a considerable part of manuscripts and early printed books from the medieval Kingdom of Hungary (around 90%) are lost or perished due to the Ottoman-Hungarian wars in the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, however, several catalogues were made of the remaining sources, such as in Hungary (Csaba Csapodi-Klára Gárdonyi Csapodiné: Bibliotheca Hungarica I-III) or in Slovakia (Julius Sopko: Codices latini medii aevi Bibliothecarum Slovakiae; Codices medii aevi, qui olim in bibliotheca Slovaciae asservabantur et nunc in Hungaria et Romania asservantur). There are remarkable notes in these kinds of sources which can be related to medieval universities and students, which also makes it easier to follow their postgraduate life as well. The research of individual social groups, especially the nobility, is greatly aided by the genealogical research conducted by Pál Engel in connection with the Hungarian noble families of the Middle Ages. In this regard, we are constantly mapping and expanding the number of students of noble origin. At the end of my paper, it becomes visible through a few examples how these sources and the literature complement each other and how students’ careers can be reconstructed from them.