Horváth Balázs előadása a Cantus Planus konferencián: A Critical Examination of the Codex Pray

A critical examination of the Codex Pray. The liturgical use of a late 12th-century Hungarian sacramentary and its European context.

The Codex Pray, copied at the end of the 12th century, represents one of the most significant cultural monuments in Hungarian history. In terms of its genre, the Codex Pray can be classified as a standard sacramentary, which is a liturgical book containing the prayers of the priest celebrating the Mass. On one hand, the book contains a number of significant parts and appendices, which make it a valuable source for a range of medieval research topics. For instance, it contains a brief historical yearbook, medical history notes in its calendar, Easter images for art history, the decisions of the inaugural Hungarian councils, and, of course, Gregorian music. On the other hand, the Old Hungarian funeral oration, preserved in the funeral ceremony, is not only the first coherent textual record of the Hungarian language, but also the first document of the Finno-Ugric language family, and even of the entire Uralic language family. The codex was discovered in 1770 by György Pray, a Jesuit priest and scholar, and since then, numerous studies have been conducted on it, primarily focusing on the Old Hungarian language texts, but also on the historical and canonical texts preserved in the codex. The objective of this paper is to ascertain which new liturgical methodology can be employed to examine the Codex Pray as a liturgical source. The research will focus on identifying the liturgical use of the Codex Pray and to which European liturgical uses it is related. This will be achieved through the methodology of the ELTE Research Group of Liturgical History and the source collection of the liturgical database Usuarium. The objective of this study is to understand what kind of liturgical use the codex follows, and for which monastic community it was compiled.