The members of HUN-REN Hungarian Research Network’s Memoria Hungariae “Hungary in Medieval Europe” research group are regular participants and speakers at conferences on Dutch-Hungarian relations. They have presented their latest research findings at a series of professional conferences including the following: “Relations between Hungary and the Low Countries” in 2008, “Stories from the Low Countries (Hungarian-Dutch early modern relations)” in 2012, “Memories of the Low Countries in Hungary: Hungarian-Low Country Points of Encounter” in 2015, and “Diplomat Writers, Writer Diplomats” in 2017, for the first time in collaboration with the Hungarian-Dutch Relations Research Group.
- The program of our current conference is in harmony with the overall objective of HUN-REN Hungarian Research Network, which intends to internationalize Hungarian scholarly activities. The research project called Memoria Hungariae concentrates primarily on the region of Central Europe, while also exploring the network of connections emanating from our region across the whole breadth of Europe. This conference focuses on the Low Countries, which is a minor region of Europe but at the same time one that is all the more significant from the perspective of the history of relations- said Professor Attila Bárány, the head of the research group to hirek.unideb.hu.
This February, in order to mark the 350th anniversary of the liberation of the galley slaves, the Faculty of Humanities and the Institute for the History of the Central European Reformation and Protestantism of Debrecen Reformed Theological University jointly organized their first conference on the history of the Protestant Church and its relationships with the intention of starting a tradition.
- This occasion has once again shed light on how far the ties between Central Europe and the Low Countries go back. This is why we reckoned that it would be worthwhile to present the latest relevant research findings on the topic at this professional conference as well, not only from an exclusively historical angle, but also from literary, cultural and linguistic perspectives- said Réka Bozzay, Head of the Department of Dutch Studies at the Institute of German Studies of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Debrecen, illuminating one of the topicalities of conference.
In addition to the participants from the host institution, the University of Debrecen, talks were also given at the conference by speakers from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church, Sapientia College of Theology of Religious Orders, the University of Szeged and the University of Tokaj, as well as by staff members of Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts and the Archives of the City of Győr.
One of the keynote speakers at the two-day event was Professor Wilken Engelbrecht from Palacký University Olomouc in the Czech Republic, who was born in the Netherlands, yet his ancestors include Moravians, Silesian Germans and Transylvanian Hungarians. Another plenary lecture was given by Rick Honings, a young professor in the Dutch Studies program at Leiden University (Universiteit Leiden), for whom this was his first visit to Debrecen. While Wilken Engelbrecht elaborated on the connection between medieval peregrination and the movement called devotio moderna, Rick Honings presented the correspondence of Dutch writer Nicolaas Beets and Zsigmond Nagy, the latter of whom had lived and taught in Debrecen. As a literary translator, Nagy rendered several of Beets’ works into Hungarian, while he was also supposed to become the first head of the Dutch Department planned to be launched at the University of Debrecen in the 1920s.
Gábor Pusztai (UD) gave a paper on the fate of Hungarians living in the Dutch East Indies during World War II, while Roland Nagy (ELTE) discussed Dutch loanwords that have entered the Hungarian language. Attila Bárány outlined the careers of clergymen from the Low Countries who came to Hungary during the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg, while László Pósán (UD) presented the story of soldiers and their entourages who had come from the Low Countries to fight in the wars against the Turks.
- For quite some time, we have maintained excellent personal and professional connections with the participants, as several of them have already visited us as lecturers or instructors, and we have also collaborated with them on a number of joint projects. For example, Professor Wilken Engelbrecht was the one who coordinated the work on the anthology of studies Socialist Transnationality in Translation, published by Bloomsbury in New York, which examines the reception of Dutch literature in Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1990. The study on the Hungarian aspect of this topic was written by Gábor Pusztai, Associate Professor at our Department of Dutch Studies. It was upon the initiative of Orsolya Réthelyi, Head of the Department of Dutch Studies at ELTE, that a Dutch-Hungarian bilingual volume on the so-called children’s trains after World War I was published, featuring papers by Gábor Pusztai and Réka Bozzay. Our students from Debrecen have had the opportunity of taking regular scholarships at Dutch Studies in Leiden for more than three decades, so it is a great pleasure for us that the head of their department will now also be teaching classes to Dutch majors at the University of Debrecen, whom we were also able to welcome as a speaker at this conference,” said the organizers.
The material of the presentations given over the two days of the conference is expected to be published later this year in a special issue of the journal Zwischen Ostsee und Adria both in English and in German.
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