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Xystus Paulus Schiers [1727-1772] dissertation on the Corvina 456 - its timeless lessons [that reach beyond itself] At the beginning of the third millennium AD, due to the debates about Europe a number of questions emerged that led scholars of historical disciplines to rethink their image of the nature of communal and individual minds. It is indeed an important question, the results of the research carried out to answer this question could form a new chapter in our cultural history, what kind of identity did Melchior Inchofer (cca. 1585-1648),*’ David Czvittinger (1675/79-1743),*°* or Xystus Paulus Schier (1727-1772)*? have? What motivated them to write about the history of the Church in Hungary,*” to compile a biographical encyclopaedia of Hungarian writers,“! or to write about Hungarian queens,*” or the cultural institutions of the time of Matthias Hunyadi? How can we describe the motivation of these scholars at the beginning of the 21st century? I think, even if only to formulate the first thoughts of the response, it is worth examining the debates that we referred to in the first sentence. The focus of these dialogues mainly began as a consequence of Europe’ crisis in the second half of the 20th century. The debaters took it for granted, and did not really address the topic, that Europe is in fact the Common Market, and this has mainly been expressed in that only the values developed in the welfare societies of the Common Market countries were (and are) considered “European”. All the realities that existed and still exist, either in Europe in the geographical sense or in Western Christian Europe according to religious maps, have hardly been taken into account. The other starting point in these debates is that the post-WWII political, economic, and social status quo is sacrosanct, and any question raised about it is in itself a denial of “Europeanness”. Countless conferences have been organized and a library of literature written on this, but the questions have generally been too theoretical and as have the answers (with the main economic players smiling cheekily, the politicians they control playing their roles, and the third estate, the free press, playing their part in controlling and directing minds and thinking). 46 ScHIER 1766.; 2nd edition: ScH1ER 1799. #7 A child of a German Lutheran family, raised Catholic, from Kőszeg, who did not study in the Hungarian Kingdom, became a Jesuit monk, lived in Messina and then in Rome. 58 He was born into a German Lutheran middle-class family in Selmecbanya, and was raised as Hungarian nobility. He studied at several universities in the German-speaking area, and later worked in Tubingen. He spent the last decades of his life in poverty as an unemployed man in his home town, due to explicit Jesuit objections. #9 Tue child of a German-speaking citizen of Lower Austria, he was educated in Pozsony and later in Vienna, and lived his life in the Augustinian Order, mainly in Vienna. 460 INCHOFER 1644. Cf. DUMMERTH 1987a, 155-204. 461 CzvITTINGER 1711. 462 SCHIER 1774a; SCHIER-ROSNACK 1776. 99
