Hungarian Literature - Renaissance and Baroque

Renaissance and Baroque

Renaissance literature flourished under the reign of King Matthias (1458–1490). Janus Pannonius, although wrote in Latin, counts as one of the most important persons in Hungarian literature, being the only significant Hungarian Humanist poet of the period. The first printing house was also founded during Matthias' reign, by András Hess, in Buda. The first book printed in Hungary was the Chronica Hungarorum.

In the 1526 most of Hungary fell under Ottoman occupation, which date is where the beginning of Middle Hungarian Period is set, in connection with various cultural changes.

The most important poets of the period was Bálint Balassi (1554–1594), Tinódi Sebestyén and Miklós Zrínyi (1620–1664). Balassi's poetry shows Mediaeval influences, his poems can be divided into three sections: love poems, war poems and religious poems. Zrínyi's most significant work, the epic Szigeti veszedelem ("Peril of Sziget", written in 1648/49) is written in a fashion similar to The Iliad, and recounts the heroic Battle of Szigetvár, where his great-grandfather died while defending the castle of Szigetvár.

Translation of Roman authors produced also some works: János Baranyai Decsi translated Sallustius' Catalina and Jughurta's war in the late 16th century and a decade later appeared the translation of Curtius Rufus' Aleaxander's life in Debrecen.

Historical works were even more numerous: the chronicle of Gáspár Heltai (see on the right) published by him in Kolozsvar, Zay Ferenc's unpublished work on the siege of Beograd from the 15th century, Kemény János', Transylvanian Duke's, and Miklós Bethlen' memoirs with János Szalárdy' volumeous, that time unpublished, work on contemporary Transylvanian history from the 17th century (from Bethlen' reign to 1660s), and Cserei Mihály's work from the early 18th century highlights the Hungarian-language literature.

Another category is historical verses in Hungarian, like that of Sebestyén Tinódi Lantos from the 16th century, Péter Ilosvay Selymes, Mihály Szabatkai and Gergely deák.

Latin works in the period are more numerous, István Szamosközy, Baranyai Decsi János, Miklós Istvánffy, Bethlen János, and Farkas Bethlen, Ferenc Forgách, György Szerémi, Ambrus Somogyi, Gianmichele Bruto, Oláh Miklós are the most important historical works from the 16th to 17th century.

In German Georg Kraus, Georg Zeiler wrote on Transylvanian history. In Spanish you can read Bernardo de Aldana's apologies for losing the castle of Lippa in 1552 to the Turks.

Among the religious literary works the most important is the Bible translation by Gáspár Károli, the Protestant pastor of Gönc, in 1590. The translation is called the Bible of Vizsoly, after the town where it was first published. (See Hungarian Bible translations for more details.) Another important religious work is the Legend of Saint Margaret, copied by Lea Ráskai around 1510 from an earlier work that did not survive.