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THE FELSŐBÜKI NAGY FAMILY AND THEIR
CENTURY IN THE HISTORY OF HUNGARY.
PATHS OF THE POLITICAL ELITE IN THE EIGH¬
TEENTH AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES
István M. Szijártó
ORCID: 0000-0003-1800-2998
This volume is not the history of the Felsöbüki Nagy family but an
investigation into some crucial aspects of the history of the Kingdom
of Hungary in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through
analyzing the careers of some outstanding members of this family.*
Chapters of this volume intend to embark on wider historical inves¬
tigations and they try to profit from some obvious parallels. What
we have here is, therefore, a certain type of microhistory.
This approach of history is based on a micro-analysis, but strives
to answer a ‘great historical question’ and, finally, it focuses on
agency. The first element of this definition is fairly clear-cut: to have
microhistory we need a micro-investigation, a historical analysis
that focuses intensively on something relatively small: an event,
an individual, a little community. Now, we make an attempt with
some members of an outstanding gentry family. However, and here
comes the second element of its definition, one that we can clearly
identify in the research practice of the original Italian microstoria
school of the 1970s and 1980s: in microhistory, it is expected that
the concentration on minute detail should uncover some more general
historical truth; the justification of the concentration on something
small lies in providing answers to these ‘great historical questions.’
And, finally, microstoria clearly insisted on human agency, arguing
that people should be seen not as puppets in the hands of underlying
social, cultural, or other forces of history, but as active individuals
who have goals and possess options and therefore make choices and
decisions.” And this is something, again, that we see very clearly in
the careers of members of the Felsöbüki Nagy family, who belonged
I would like to thank Dr. Sonia Spurdle and Dr. Malcolm Hogg for their kind
assistance with the English text.
> Cf. Magntisson-Szijarté 2013 and Szijärté 2017.