Our basic research will investigate how saints and martyrs were used as ‘sites’ of religious and national memory, and how these persons were provided as ‘loci’ for ritualized remembrance in early modern Hungary and Europe. We concentrate on exploring various representations of early modern saints and martyrs in the context of different formation of religious and national identity. Representations of medieval and early modern martyrs and saints in several genres, registers, and texts will help us to explore the reasons of their different roles in religious, national, and cultural memory.
We continue our earlier basic research and publication of the oeuvre of the seventeenth century Hungarian Puritan preacher, Pál Medgyesi, whose works are the most important sources of Protestant cultural memory, and martyrdom.
We publish text editions, online databases, and organise conferences and workshops to deliver research papers in a growing scholarly environment, and turn these texts into publications (studies, volume of studies, monographs).
Our research group has 15 members, who work as professors or scholars in nine institutions: six in Hungary, two in Romania and one in Italy. We consider the formation of the next generation of scholars very important, for this reason at the weekly meetings of the research group we involve in our discussions graduate and PhD students as well.