REFLECTIONS ON THE NEW EDITION OF THE GÖMÖRY CODEX (PART I)

Gömöry Codex (GömK.) is a manuscript of 328 pages, mainly containing prayers, of Dominican provenance. Its core material was copied in 1516 in a nunnery located on what is called Margaret Island today. The full transliteration of GömK., with a facsimile version, footnotes, and 130 pages of introduction, was published by LEA HAADER and ZSUZSANNA PAPP in 2001 as volume 26 of the series Old Hungarian Codices. The commentaries in this edition of GömK. are of high professional standards, and the text edition itself is very good, too. Its Introduction is the most detailed study so far within the literature related to the publication of Hungarian-language codices. Following the general method of the series, it describes the codex itself, relates its history, thoroughly investigates, among other things, characteristics of content of some portions of the text, indicating their Latin sources and parallel portions of other Hungarian codices, and covers the interrelationships of Hungarian and Latin textual versions. It is intriguing that the closest textual parallels of some prayers are found in the Dominican nuns' prayer books of the St. Catherine Cloister of Nuremberg. The Introduction thoroughly presents palaeographic and orthographic features of the copiers' hands, 11 in all. The present paper partly reviews this edition of GömK., and partly discusses, in relation to this edition, certain historical linguistic and cultural historical aspects of, primarily Hungarian, codices.