Janus Pannonius:

Sylva Panegyrica ad Guarinum... (1518)

The Concordantiae caritatis of Budapest is the most richly illustrated written document in Hungary from the Middle Ages. The piece contains the 14th century author's, Ulrich von Lilienfeld's, work who between 1345 and 1351 was the abbot of the South-Austrian Lilienfeld cloister of Ciszterc.

Published in 2011.

On November 10, 2019 the facsimile was published for the 425th anniversary of the founding of Tamási Áron High School in Székelyudvarhely commissioned by the Hungarian Research Institute for National Strategy.

The multi-subject, Franciscan codex was written for nuns. Five separately used volumes were combined in the making of the final piece.

From the personal tone of the afterword, we can conclude the Franciscan monk András Nyújtódi who was from Szeklerland translated and copied the work in 1526 for his younger sister who was a nun named Judit, so that she would not be in her cell without her saint's book. With the remonstrances and interjected, short explanatory comments aimed at nuns, both works have many idiosyncratic, independent elements in their own right.

The Codex was first owned by Judit Nyújtódi as evidenced by the resin of the first two volumes. The Codex's mid 16th century Central-Transylvanian, renaissance, leather binding proves that the individual volumes were bound together in the mid 16th century. The fate of the document is unknown after the 16th century. Imre Lukinich speculates that based on the pen drawing of Jesus and Mary pasted on to the flyleaf of the back of the first binding that the volume had once belonged to the Jesuit boarding school in Székelyudvarhely. Based on comments by Daniel Fancsali, the parish priest of Gyergyószentmiklós and later teacher and principal of the boarding school in Székelyudvarhely, it is certain that in 1810 the Codex was in his possession, and it was from him that the volume arrived at the Catholic high school's library in Székelyudvarhely. It was discovered here in 1876 by Sámuel Szabó, a protestant boarding school teacher from Kolozsvár.

Tamási Áron High School in Székelyudvarhely celebrated its 425th anniversary in November of 2018. The Codex of Nyújtód and the Album Gymnasii were published together for this event.

The Album Gymnasii is a valuable record of the high school's old history. It contains the yearly record of the names of all the teachers and the students from 1689 to first semester of the 1831-32 school year.

So why is this bulky, book-shaped album that is a school document, or should we say time capsule, valuable?

Firstly, it provides an accurate data of the student population in a given time. As witnessed through the album, the high school in 1689 had 73 students in its top 4 classes and 125 students all together. Over the years, the student attendance would drastically fluctuate reaching its peak attendances in the years 1743 (228 students), 1752 (213 students), 1759 (206 students), and 1767 (215 students). In other years the attendance was roughly around 100.

As a result of the educational work and upbringing, the school has produced several notable alumni that went on to give positive contributions to society. Some alumni have academic contributions while others have contributions to literature. Some include Dávid Szabó, who founded a school of literature, Balázs Orbán, a scholar in geography and ethnography, Áron Tamási and Sándor Tomcsa, who are both authors, and Ferenc Szemlér, who completed his first two years of high school here and went on to be a poet.

This book is one of the greatest memories of the Hungarian Middle Ages. The ornamental pages come from the codex of the provost of the coronation church in Székesfehérvár, Domonkos Kálmáncsehi, which is now preserved in New York, far away from its place of origin. This richly decorated manuscript, written on parchment, helped the prelate fulfil his liturgical and devotional duties, the first half being a breviary - a priestly prayer book - and the second half a mass book. At the beginning of the codex was placed a calendar in which the order and feasts of the church year could be followed. The small size and the placement of these two works with different functions in one volume suggest that Domonkos Kálmáncsehi might have used this codex primarily during his travels.The manuscript carries the message of a great era. The 1480s were an extraordinary decade in the late 15th century in Hungary, in the 1480s, when the past and the future met. Centuries of influences and the aspirations of generations have matured by this time, and they have sounded the great overture of the Hungarian Renaissance at full volume. King Matthias Hunyadi (1458-1490) occupies Vienna, the construction of the royal residences begins, and the world-famous royal library, the Bibliotheca Corvina, is established - just to name a few moments. The model to follow was the leading cultural trend of the era, the Italian Renaissance. Architects, sculptors, carpenters, book painters, bookbinders and other craftsmen, musicians, astronomers, jurists, historians and other humanists came to Hungary at that time. Everything that happened or started then - and this is already the future - had a fundamental effect on the following centuries of Hungarian culture.The book-producing workshop in Buda not only served the needs of the royal library but also worked for high-ranking prelates. The codex of Domonkos Kálmáncsehi was also made in the royal workshop. Its decoration is also extremely valuable because his motifs are largely derived from manuscripts of the Royal Library, which at that time already praised the handiwork of Italian book painters. Yet, if we take a closer look at the ornamental pages, in addition to the Renaissance decoration, we can also discover the elements of Central European Gothic book painting: elongated, pointed leaves with elegant tendrils and the main initials of the breviary, which are uniformly Gothic. We can witness a natural fusion of the Italian Renaissance and the local art tradition in these pages.The codex was very fortunate to survive the destruction of medieval Hungary and the centuries that followed. In 1782 it was known in the Cistercian abbey of Viktring near Klagenfurt, and then it went to the library of the Princes of Lichtenstein, Vienna. By 1948, however, it was already appearing in New York. He finally found his current home in 1963 in the collection of The Morgan Library & Museum. The facsimile selection made from it is also significant because it makes this important but almost inaccessible manuscript available to the public.