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54 Ildikó Sz. Kristóf particular, local readings affect the ways in which the schoolbook was interpreted, “domesticated” in their respective cultures? Variety in the uses The last concept of research that I would like to propose is variety in the uses. It seems that the local adaptation, the local interpretation or—to borrow again one of the central terms of the French history of reading—the local appropriation of Raff's schoolbook have changed from translation to translation, that is, from culture to culture. In my previous study I wrote more on this aspect, analyzing the characteristics of the Hungarian, the English, and the French adaptations and mentioning some features of the original German version as well as the Slaveno-Serbian and the Russian translations (Sz. Kristöf 2011: 323-333). Due to space limitations here, let me direct the reader to that study of mine and point only to the most important features of the Hungarian adaptation. Beyond the fact that Göttingen was appreciated as a center of contemporary sciences by the Hungarian (mostly noble and Protestant) students who regularly attended its university during the second half of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth, each of the three Hungarian editions of the schoolbook (Veszprem 1799, Kassa [Kosice, in today’s Slovakia] 1835, and Pest 1846) was deeply embedded in the movement of political resistance and national awakening that emerged in the Kingdom of Hungary against the Austrian Habsburg (and primarily, Catholic) domination during the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. Each of the three Hungarian translators (Jözsef Fäbiän, a learned pastor of the Reformed Church who identified with many ideas of the French and German Enlightenment; Peter Vajda, a journalist/novelist-turned-peasant of Lutheran religion who proposed reforms of the Lutheran education system; and Mihäly Täncsics, a radical political writer who sympathized with the ideas of early utopian socialism) belonged to certain periods as well as branches of this movement (Sz. Kristöf 2011: 323-325). The order and the representations that Raff provided of nature and human history are to be interpreted in this particular context in Hungary. The most important message of the schoolbook, according to which, as I mentioned above, there was a chance for progress for each of the societies in the world, could conform very well with the actual desires and expectations of the Hungarian reformists, whose group the translators and the editors of Raff belonged to. The schoolbook could provide a philosophical confirmation of their belief that there was a hope—or rather, a “historical necessity”—for the political-cultural improvement in Hungary, too. As is evident from the prefaces, footnotes, and other textual and paratextual features of the Hungarian editions, the actual sociocultural context of the publication has vested the translations with a peculiar political meaning. For some groups of its readers at least, this Göttingen schoolbook was conceived, and used, as a cultural
