Gömör vármegye mezőgazdasága és ipara Ladislaus Bartholomaeides historiográfus bemutatásában

: Ladislaus Bartholomaeides (1754-1825), Lutheran pastor and deacon of Gömör, educated in Wittenberg, came from the Hungarian noble family of Ördög, among his ancestors we find Lutheran pastors and intellectuals going back several generations; his works were written in Latin, German, Slovakized Czech while no printed work of his is known in Hungarian. His main work is a historical-geographical-statistical description of Gömör County (Notitia historico–geographico–statistica); the work not only quotes the county records of Mátyás Bél – whom he regarded as his model – in its title, but also in its approach and even in the typographical presentation of the book. Thus, the description of the economy, mineral resources, society, churches, property and population relations, culture, etc. (Staatsmerkwürdigkeiten) can be found in his almost 800-page book, which is much more extensive than the description of the county by Bél. The study examines the chapters on agriculture and industry in Bartholomaeides’ book: in addition to traditional crafts and agricultural production, the beginning of the industrial revolution and the new agricultural phenomena (metallurgy and coal mines, and the cultivation of new crops such as potatoes, flax, tobacco, poppies, etc.) can be observed in the period (from the late 18th century onwards). Since Bartholomaeides wrote his scientific works on the country in Latin, they necessarily reflect the cultural heritage of classical antiquity; the Latin reminiscences, quotations and allusions suggest that his works can be placed between the coordinates of literature and scholarship: his oeuvre reveals the dilemmas of the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries in relation to the dichotomy between the old and the new. A similar dichotomy can be observed in the author’s identity: he can perhaps be considered one of the last Hungarus intellectuals in an age when the idea of territorially based nationhood is disintegrating and is being replaced by the idea of modern nationalism.