Magyar Zoltán

Legends of Early Hungarian Saints: type- and motif-index

Princess Kinga (Kinga, Kunigunda)

The family of king Béla IV (1235-1270) displays an uncommon number of saintly daughters. The king and his wife, the Byzantine Mary Lascaris had ten children, of whom two daughters, Kinga and Margaret, were formally canonized, while two others, Yolante and Constance were beatified by the Church. Kinga, the first-born of the royal family, was born in 1224 and at the age of fifteen married Boleslaw, prince of Cracow. They made an oath of chastity in marriage, which brought Boleslaw his nickname ‘the Bashful’. The Mongol invasion that devastated Hungary in 1241 caused heavy losses to Poland as well and in the work of reconstruction and consolidation of the country Kinga played an equally outstanding part as his father, king Béla IV, did in Hungary. After the death of her husband Kinga entered the monastery of Ószandec (Stary Sacz) that she herself had founded and became its abbess until her death in 1292. Her burial-place still attracts crowds of pilgrims to the shrine. Although she had been worshipped as a saint for centuries in Poland and Lithuania, her formal canonization was only completed in 1999 (Witkowska 1961; Szwarga 1987; Balanyi 1991).

Legends of Early Hungarian Saints: type- and motif-index

Tartalomjegyzék

Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2026

ISBN: 978 963 664 185 6

Művelődéstörténet Idegen nyelvű

The work of folklorist Zoltán Magyar throws light on a relatively little-known segment of the dynastyc cult of saints in Central European cultural history. The hagiographies and legends written on different members of the Árpadian dynasty, ruling in Hungary between the 11th and 13th centuries, and their contemporaries endowed with the aura of sanctity, occur not only in their medieval Hungarian legendry but have also become part of the liturgical tradition and the cult of saints on German, Polish and Byzantine soil. The thematic and generic variety of this legendry and its many folkloric implications show close parallels with another major work of medieval European hagiography: the legends of early Irish saints. The type- and motif-index and generatic catalogue compiled by Zoltán Magyar orders the epic tradition, based on 11rh-16th century written sources, of twelve Hungarian royal saints who have become the subject of legends shortly after their death. Beside classification according to the type of legendd heroes and themes, the book also contains an analysis of the biographical data, of the historical sources and of the primary types and motifs of hagiographies.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/magyar-early-hungarian-saints-type-and-motif-index//

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