Adatok Balassi és Rimay életrajzához

Abstract

A copy of the 1592 Prague edition of Edmund Campion's Decem rationes, in possession of the library of the ELTE Department of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Hungarian Literature, is presumably the one Bálint Balassi used when he translated the first part of the work into Hungarian. Ildikó Bárczi has established that Balassi had used a copy of that edition. At the end of 1593, bishop Ferenc Forgách presented our exemplar to a lowerranking clergyman, so as to propagate the text in a national language. Half a year later Balassi died. His legacy contains the translation of the first part. Somebody has collated this exemplar with Balassi's translation, possibly with the aim of identifying the manuscript's content. Thus, a manuscript of Balassi's translation and the copy of the book were probably together in the collator's hand. During a Department exploration of the Wattay (Watay, Wathay) Family Archives, the name of the late Renaissance poet János Rimay appeared in two letters of hypothecation. At first, a letter from 1630 is going to be presented, in which Rimay is only witness, then a letter from 1603. In the latter, Rimay and Péter Madách pawn together their estate in Ipoly-Nagy-Kér. There were frequent litigations between Madách Péter and Rimay on estate and inheritance matters, among others, in 1603. The letter from 1603 does not necessarily confirm the unflattering portrait of Péter Madách established by biographical writings about him.