This book is a study on the beginnings of Hungarian political thought, as set out by two 17th century mirrors of princes, the first attempts at political theorising in the Hungarian vernacular. The unlikely source text for these treatises was an advice book by King James the VIth and Ist to his son, Basilikon Doron. As an analysis of the translation and re-reading of a widely circulated text by the king of England and Scotland, the book is also a study in early modern cross-cultural dialogue, situated in the context of recent discussions on transculturalism, and more specifically on the intellectual connections between Britain and the world.
The various contemporary translations of King James’s book to diverse contexts and languages enlisted it to different agendas, making it difficult to cast the process of translation and transmission as a story of a reception of an idea. They rather call attention to the importance of the local stakes involved in translation. How ideas originally formulated in a Scottish context came to be re-articulated in a Central European one is a particularly interesting story that provides us with a possibility to paint a picture of the various political languages in use at the time, from divine right arguments to elements of civic humanism, neostoicism, political Calvinism in its magisterial version, Old Testament biblicism and millenarianism.
