Copia and Historical Note-Taking in an Academic Environment : The Scholarly Manuscripts of the Hungarian Historiographer Péter Révay

Förköli, Gábor (2023) Copia and Historical Note-Taking in an Academic Environment : The Scholarly Manuscripts of the Hungarian Historiographer Péter Révay. In: Knowledge Shaping : Student Note-taking Practices in Early Modernity. De Gruyter, Berlin, Boston, pp. 29-68. ISBN 9783111072722

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Abstract

This chapter is a case study on the Hungarian historiographer Péter Révay (1568–1622) by discussing his method of note-taking acquired during his years of education. In addition to three volumes of lecture notes from his time spent at the Jesuit college of Vienna, Révay composed a commonplace book with excerpts from his readings about moral topics at the Lutheran gymnasium of Strasbourg. These documents attest that he received a Jesuit education harmonizing a humanist approach to dialectics with a traditional peripatetic curriculum, while his commonplace book from Strasbourg is interpreted through the optics of Johannes Sturm’s pedagogical ideas, focusing on paroemiology and Ciceronian eloquence. The chapter demonstrates that the apparently aleatory structure of the commonplace book derives from the teaching methods of Melchior Junius, Révay’s master. Finally, I argue that Cicero’s moral categories, i. e. honestum (righteous) and utile (expedient) were fundamental to Révay in his evaluation of historical examples.

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