Table Of ContentA Humanist on the Frontier
A Humanist on the Frontier explores the remarkable life of Sebastian
Ambrosius, a 16th-century Lutheran minister and intellectual from Késmárk
(now Kežmarok) in present-day Slovakia, formerly on the borderland of the
Kingdom of Hungary.
Through an examination of Ambrosius’ publications and correspondence,
this book throws new light on the dynamics of urban communities in
Upper Hungary, communication within the humanist Republic of Letters
in both Central European and wider European networks and ecclesiastical
controversies. Adopting methods of microhistory and cultural history, it
also reconstructs Ambrosius’ life by positioning him in various contexts that
trace his relationship to, and interpretations of, themes of power, tradition,
vocation, communication and identity.
This book is essential reading for scholars and students of early modern
European history, as well as those interested in microhistory, cultural history
and the Republic of Letters.
Marcell Sebők teaches early modern history and cultural heritage at the
Central European University, Budapest-Vienna.
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A Humanist on the Frontier
The Life Story of a Sixteenth-Century Central European Pastor
Marcell Sebők
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A Humanist on the Frontier
The Life Story of a Sixteenth-Century
Central European Pastor
Marcell Sebők
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Marcell Sebők
The right of Marcell Sebők to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sebők, Marcell, author.
Title: A humanist on the frontier: the life story of a sixteenth-century
central European pastor / Marcell Sebők.
Other titles: Humanista a hataron. English
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021009100 (print) | LCCN 2021009101 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367482961 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032059280 (pbk) |
ISBN 9781003039129 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Ambrosius, Sebastian, 1554-1600. | Kezmarok
(Slovakia)–Biography. | Spis (Poland and Slovakia)–Church history. |
Reformation–Spis (Poland and Slovakia)
Classification: LCC DB2791.A43 S4313 2022 (print) |
LCC DB2791.A43 (ebook) | DDC 284.1092 [B]–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009100
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009101
This English-language edition is a fully revised version of Humanista a
határon. A késmárki Sebastian Ambrosius története (1554-1600), originally
published in Hungarian (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2007).
Translation funded by the László Tetmajer Fund of the Hungarian
Studies Program, Department of Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana
University-Bloomington.
ISBN: 978-0-367-48296-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-05928-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-03912-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Translator’s note x
Introduction 1
Notes 13
1 To be young, gifted and motivated 18
Educational reform and the eminent scholar 18
Wittenberg: Scholarship and experience 29
Homecoming: Homeland, hometown 38
Notes 44
2 Confessio Scepusiana, confessio Ambrosiana 54
From Késmárk to Eperjes 54
‘In that period, the Formula Concordiae assumed the role of
troublemaker’ 59
From Eperjes to Késmárk 67
Everyday routines 72
Notes 84
3 Controversy and the art of persuasion 93
A pamphlet attacking Ambrosius 93
Ambrosius and Gergely Horváth: The genesis of their
confessional dispute 96
The Antithesis and the responses to it 112
Support marshalled by means of letters 120
A convoluted battle of words 131
Personal debates: The Késmárk Colloquia 140
The turning point 144
Notes 157
vi Contents
4 The practice of humanism in the Republic of Letters 173
Ambrosius’ legacy 173
‘I would like to ascertain whether my letter actually
arrived’ 179
News from the garden 190
The Schöppel affair: Recommendations and reputation 192
The society of ‘true-believers’ 198
Notes 212
Conclusions 222
Notes 232
Bibliography 235
Index 253
Acknowledgements
By the time this book first appeared in Hungarian in 2007, I had already
spent several years researching and reconstructing my protagonist’s life
story. In 2020, I reread and rewrote certain sections of the book in pro-
ducing this English version, and when I reached the final chapter, in which
the main character, Sebastian Ambrosius, writes to his friends about the
epidemic that was ravaging the countryside around his city, I was imme-
diately struck by the disheartening parallel between his time and our own:
like Sebastian in 1600, I am now in 2020 formulating my thoughts in a
time of plague. Our communication, our tools and our knowledge of nature
and the world obviously differ, but our two points in time are also bound
by the similar objectives of our labour and the essence of our occupations:
teaching, the composition and interpretation of texts and their distribution
– humanist activities.
The preparation and finalisation of this English edition took place during
the coronavirus quarantine, which fact has had several consequences: I now
have a much better understanding of the anxieties that gripped Ambrosius
when the plague struck his region. The lockdown has given me more time to
concentrate on the emphases of sentences written long ago and the contem-
porary conclusions to be drawn from them. Another positive consequence
of the curfew that has decisively helped me in my work is the fact that vast
databases have recently been made available, allowing me free access to an
enormous quantity of scholarly literature. The past decade and a half has
seen the digitisation of a great volume of primary sources and professional
literature; however, the sudden dawn of the age of open access has now
made it possible to cite a range of previously hidden or difficult-to-find texts
and images.
This circumstance has been particularly advantageous in producing the
volume at hand, given that a large quantity of relevant scholarly literature
has been published in the 13 years since the printing of the Hungarian edi-
tion of Ambrosius’ story. In a significant portion of this recent work, ecclesi-
astical historians, early modern social historians and biographers have used
familiar conceptual and chronological frameworks to examine the person-
alities, communities and movements of the period of the reformations. At
viii Acknowledgements
the same time, however, contemporary researchers have also exhibited a
notable desire to acquaint their readers with new approaches, methodolo-
gies and milieux. The writing of history is still geopolitically determined
(here I am thinking above all of the resharpening of the classical East–West
divide), and the relative unfamiliarity of the languages of East Central
Europe has also contributed to the maintenance of a sort of distance. Even
so, the younger generations of historians who study Central Europe have
now been producing English-language studies for at least two decades, and
thus the region’s early modern protagonists are being discussed by an ever-
expanding circle of students; their histories have inspired new scholarly dis-
course and helped reconceptualise certain historiographical traditions.
This book was born of similar aspirations: in the person of Sebastian
Ambrosius, it introduces a previously obscure humanist pastor from a small
town called Késmárk (now Kežmarok, Slovakia), who was also one of
the most active intellectuals of his generation, a man who participated in
Europe’s communication network on an equal footing with his peers across
the continent. The contexts of his activities have been a crucial source of
help in my attempts to reconstruct his career; I have presented and inter-
preted Ambrosius’ thoughts and deeds against a variety of backdrops – the
urban history of Szepes County, the history of the Lutheran Church, con-
fessional debates, humanist education and teaching, patron–client relation-
ships and the network of the Respublica litteraria. I have likewise provided
an introduction to my protagonist’s urban-intellectual contemporaries
(also unknown to the broader scholarly public), thus shedding light on the
opportunities available to the intellectuals of this Protestant-majority bor-
der region, the pressures and constraints they faced as a result of their king-
dom’s lack of a university and the partial institutionalisation of the theory
and practice of 16th-century late humanism. The chapters of this book, like
microhistorical cross-sections, introduce a series of thematics in Ambrosius’
life – his scholarly peregrination, the process of confessionalisation, confes-
sional debates, correspondence and other means of communication – which
period-specific contexts serve to illustrate the peculiarities of his career, the
choices he made as an actively engaged theologian and the consequences
thereof. This attempt to reconstruct Ambrosius’ story is thus a mosaic of
interpretations, not a traditional historical biography.
When a book is ready for publication, we always take note of the people
who helped us bring it into being, and the personal and professional net-
work that took shape during this period very much resembles the early mod-
ern Respublica in the way it supported and facilitated my creative process.
From the start, my friend and colleague Gábor Klaniczay encouraged me to
work on an English version of Ambrosius’ story and would not allow me to
put off the decision to do so. I was assisted by the editor of the Microhistory
series, István M Szijártó, who immediately accepted this manuscript and –
with the approval of his co-editor Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon – promoted
its publication. Katalin Szende always helped me with my urban-historical
Acknowledgements ix
questions about Szepes County and Upper Hungary, and also alerted me
to the possibility of submitting an application for translation. Fortunately,
it was funded by the László Tetmajer Fund of the Hungarian Studies
Program, Department of Central Eurasian Studies, at the Indiana University,
Bloomington, for which I am grateful to László Borhi. I would also like to
express my thanks to Jason George Anthony Vincz for the quality of his
translation, to Éva Eszter Szabó for reviewing the text and to Sebastian
Krasnovsky.
Having inspired me earlier in my academic career, Pál Ács has likewise
recently helped me with the writing of this book; he also produced the most
thorough review of its original Hungarian version. András Szabó and the
recently departed Katalin Péter played significant roles in my early research
and in the processing and discussion of this material. My work was also
improved by the questions and advice of István Monok, Péter Ötvös, Bálint
Keserű, Miklós Latzkovits and György Endre Szőnyi, as well as the late
János M Bak, who perceptively and sarcastically pointed out which of my
assertions were still imprecise. Two other charismatic individuals have had
an enormous effect on my vocation as a historian and on the topics I have
chosen: Natalie Zemon Davis and Marianna D Birnbaum. Throughout their
careers, they have both demonstrated the beauty and importance of story-
telling, and I am grateful to them for their supportive expressions of interest
in my writing.
Last, but certainly not least, I would like to express my thanks to those
who are closest to me and have been with me over the course of the decades
it took to process Ambrosius’ story. In harmony with the historical chronol-
ogy, I would like to thank Emese, Kinga and Andi for their help in making
it possible for me to concentrate on my tasks and the writing of this book,
which I dedicate to my sons, Áron, Gergő and Artúr. If my boys ever read
it, I hope these lines and chapters will impress upon them the value of living
a life of serious plans and ambitions.
