Hungarian literature

by Emil Reich

CHAPTER IX.

1520-1711.

During the period in question very little was done for historic and scientific studies. John Cséri de Apáca (1625-1660), an enthusiastic student and patriot, published a small Hungarian “Encyclopedia” (1655), in which the elements of knowledge, both philologic, natural and mathematical are given in a simple and clear manner. Francis Páriz-Pápai published a much used dictionary of the Hungarian and Latin languages (1708). The nine books of the chronicle of John Szalárdi, who died 1666 (“Siralmas Krónika”), form the first attempt at historiography in the Hungarian language. Some of the leading men of that age left memoirs; and grammarians were also not wanting. The great philosophic wave, sweeping over Europe in the seventeenth century (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Pierre Bayle), left scarcely any traces in Hungarian Literature, except in Cséri’s Encyclopedia, where Cartesianism is not quite absent.