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• Review of Scholarship on the Admonitions of King Saint Stephen of Hungary

  151–158

  Előd Nemerkényi

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  58

  The purpose of the following discussion is to demonstrate that the philological study of the fortuna of the Admonitions of King Saint Stephen of Hungary provides important contributions to the characteristic stages of the development of Latinist scholarship from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance until today. The Admonitions, a mirror of princes composed in the eleventh century and attributed to the first Christian king of Hungary, has attracted pious and scholarly attention for a millennium – including the hagiographic tradition of medieval Hungary and the legal tradition of the Corpus iuris Hungarici. Based on its late manuscript tradition, hypercritical scholars suggested that the Admonitions was a humanist forgery or at least an interpolated and stylistically polished text. From the Renaissance on, philologists and editors have addressed various issues of textual criticism such as the problem of dating and authorship, grammatical features (orthography, morphology, and syntax), stylistic devices (vocabulary, prose rhyme and rhythm), and textual parallels (Biblical, Classical, and Carolingian Latin). The way scholars have studied the Latinity of the Admonitions against the standards of Classical, Medieval, and Humanistic Latin for centuries reveals a great deal about their own approaches to their Latinist trade in particular – and therefore about Neo-Latin studies in general.

• Anmerkungen zu den Beziehungen der mittellateinischen und der ungarischen Textraditionen der Vita Margarite de Hungaria Ordinis Predicatorum

  217–225

  Ilona M. Nagy

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  28

  The oldest Latin legend of Saint Margaret of Hungary (legenda vetus, LV, about 1275) survived in only one manuscript, a copy found in Bologna, dated to the beginning of 15th century (1409-10). The text of the legend in the manuscript is in many places debased and to some extent shortened. This paper deals with the question how the Medieval Hungarian legend of Saint Margaret (the only surviving copy from 1510), which contains almost the complete text of LV in vernacular translation, can help in correcting the manuscript and reconstructing the original text of the oldest Latin legend. Medieval German translations of LV are also referred to. Some special problems of the edition (1937) are mentioned in this connection as well.

• King of Kings Ardashir I as Xerxes in the Late Antique Latin Sources

  143-153

  Márk Sólyom

  Views:

  255

  The last ruler of the Severan dynasty, Emperor Severus Alexander had to face an entirely new threat in Mesopotamia, because in 224 AD the Parthian royal house of the Arsacids, which had ruled in the East for nearly half a millennium, was dethroned by the Neo-Persian Sasanian dynasty and the new rulers of Persia were extremely hostile to the Roman Empire. The vast majority of the late antique Latin sources (Aurelius Victor, Eutropius, Festus, Jerome, Orosius, Cassiodorus, Iordanes) call the first Sasanian monarch, Ardashir I (reigned 224–241 AD), who was at war with Rome between 231 and 233 AD, Xerxes, although the Greek equivalent of the Middle Persian name Ardashir is Artaxerxes, as used by the Greek sources. In the Latin textual tradition we can find the correct Greek name of Ardashir only in the Historia Augusta. The paper seeks answers to the question of why Ardashir was usually called Xerxes by late antique Latin sources.