Ladislaus Bartholomaeides, the Historiographer of Gömör County and his Works

Restás, Attila (2025) Ladislaus Bartholomaeides, the Historiographer of Gömör County and his Works. EPHEMERIS HUNGAROLOGICA : A MAGYARSÁGKUTATÓ INTÉZET FOLYÓIRATA, 5 (2). pp. 53-64. ISSN 2786-3522 (print); 2786-3514 (online)

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Abstract

Ladislaus Bartholomaeides (1754–1825) was a Lutheran pastor, deacon of Gömör and a prominent scholar and historiographer of his native land, County of Gömör. He was educated at the University of Wittenberg in the Josephine era. After returning home, he began publishing some smaller historical treaties about his native land and its inhabitants. His main work was a description of County of Gömör (Notitia historico–geographico–statistica, 1806–1808.) The adjective ’statistica’ in the title of his book indicates that all factors are discussed, relevant for the state and economy policy (society, churches, population, mineral sources etc.) which contemporary German scholarship called Staatsmerkwürdigkeiten. Also his paternal ancestors were pastors of Hungarian noble origin, and his mother’s family was belonged to the welthy landowners in Upper Hungary, Ladislaus Bartholomaeides was a native Slovak speaker, and he only learnt Hungarian in his youth, when he was employed as a cantor, i.e. as a Hungarian schoolmaster in the southern part of his county where the Hungarian language was mostly spoken, before his academic peregrination to abroad. He is not known to have written any significant work in Hungarian, as he wrote all his textbooks, scholarly works or religious writings in Latin, German and Slovakized Czech. This kind of identity is called Hungarus identity which united the inhabitants of the multi-ethnic Hungaria before the national awekening of the 19th century. In my paper I focus the connections of the emerging premodern national ideologies and the multi-cultural local society in Bartholomaeides’ life and works.

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