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THE FELSŐBÜKI NAGY FAMILY AND THEIR CENTURY IN THE HISTORY OF HUNGARY. PATHS OF THE POLITICAL ELITE IN THE EIGHTEENTH 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 investigations 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.
