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place and create?" to get an invitation to a symposium, and to have the opportunity
to access the greatest library of the era, the library established in the Buda royal
court, the Bibliotheca Corvina.
This library later became one of the most frequently mentioned symbols of
Hungarian culture. We shall see that in the 16th and 17th centuries this library
was part of the Hungarus consciousness, in the 17th and 18th centuries the Aus¬
trian court included it in constructing a common imperial culture for itself, and
the Transylvanian princely centre also embraced it as a symbol of common culture.
‘The universitas Saxonum likewise acknowledged it if only to measure their own
cultural achievements as equal to the Great King’s and to make this obvious to the
Szeklers, who, in their view, were ignorant people. However, from the last third
of the 18th century and from the beginning of the 19th century it became a stable
element in Hungarian consciousness. By this time the Habsburg court used the
individual units of the collection only as a tool in its political actions either to find
compromise or to create annoyance.
I believe that at the beginning of the 21st century, Hungary, while attempting
to preserve itself as a nation state within the European Common Market, is mak¬
ing an effort to emphasise the existence of this library in international dialogue
as the library that has contributed to the preservation of a common European
heritage and the maintenance of the knowledge of tradition. Librarians are also
emphasising the spiritual relations between the Bibliotheca Corvina and the Bib¬
liotheca regnicolaris founded by Count Ferenc Széchényi. Let us look at the fate of
this library after the death of its founder.
The histories of the Corvina library
‘The scholarly literature has never really confronted the almost contemporary his¬
toriography of the library of King Matthias. Klara Zolnai summarised the data
collected by the members of several generations of scholars in her bibliographi¬
cal volume following the celebrations of the 450th anniversary of the death of
King Matthias.*!8 This book is, as I have said, a milestone in the research history
of the Bibliotheca Corvina, but also the beginning of a new classification. Csaba
Csapodi and his wife, Klara Gardonyi, studied most of the corvinas on the basis
of autopsy, they gave clear answers to many philological questions, and traced the
history of all the codices and incunabula mentioned in connection with Matthias’s
library." They also dealt with the 16th-17th century afterlife of the library in
217 Brazosrocki 1976; Fever-Totu 1990; Jankovics-Klaniczay T., ed., Matthias Corvinus..., 1994;
DaCosta KaurMann 1995; Marost 1996.
218 ZOLNAI K.—Firz 1942.
29 "THE most important summaries: Csapopı 1973; CsapoDI-CsAPoDINE GÄRDONYI, Bib]. Corviniana,
1990. At the same time, it is astonishing to me that basic works (codex descriptions) such as Mihäly
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