Saints Colloquia Series: Public lecture by Eszter Konrád

Eszter Konrád (CEU)

The Hagiography of St. Francis in the Hungarian Vernacular

Although by the early 16th century almost all of the most famous Franciscan saints were present in some form in sermon collections, legendaries, liturgical and prayer books used in Hungary and some of them were also represented in visual arts, none of the mendicant saints, considering also the saints and the blessed of the Dominican Order, turn up in the Hungarian vernacular codex literature as many times as St. Francis of Assisi. He is present in at least nine Old Hungarian codices written between the late 14th and the mid-16th century. The variety of the contents of the codices shows that the hagiographic writings about Francis found their way to the Hungarian vernacular not only in the form of legends but also served as a basis for different genres such as exemplum, sermon or prayer. Among the codices that contain texts of different length on the saint, there is one entirely dedicated to him and his companions: the Jókai Codex, the earliest manuscript book written entirely in Hungarian around 1440. This paper, in addition to re-examining the Latin sources of the Jókai Codex and relating them to the milieu they were produced in, seeks to present the recurrent themes and episodes in the hagiography of the Poverello produced in the vernacular based on the texts of the Old Hungarian codices.

Eszter Konrád is PhD candidate at the Department of Medieval Studies of the Central European University, Budapest. She is currently working on her dissertation about the representation of the saints of the mendicant orders in late medieval Hungary. Her main field of interest is late medieval devotional literature, especially vernacular hagiography.

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