András Kubinyi: a Life’s Work and an Award

The second half of the twentieth century was a key period of medieval studies in Hungary. Thanks to the endeavors undertaken and the groundbreaking results achieved by great scholars of the time, this was the period when medieval archaeology, in the modern sense of the term, was born in the country. One of the prominent figures in the historical and archaeological research of the Middle Ages was Professor András Kubinyi, whose work was facilitated mainly by two institutions, the Budapest History Museum and the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). His internationally acknowledged contribution to urban history is perhaps the most important aspect of his life’s work, but at the same time he produced outstanding scholarship on the period of King Matthias and the Jagiellonian Dynasty, and published quite a few studies on church and military history, as well as social and economic history. A new type of call for applications, inviting leading scholars and reflecting the complexity and interdisciplinary character of Kubinyi’s academic and educational achievements, was announced in 2005 by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund. This call marked the launch of a research project led by Professor Kubinyi himself that aimed to produce a comprehensive study of economic history in medieval Hungary through the analysis of written and archaeological sources. The complexity of this agenda was by no means accidental. András Kubinyi started his scholarly career as an archivist, and he realized early on that the scarce written sources of Hungary must be supplemented by objects and visual representations, and that the combined analysis of these diverse sources facilitates a deeper understanding of past realities. He was no archaeologist, although he studied the subject and worked with and among archaeologists in the Budapest History Museum, following with attention a number of large-scale excavations, such as the one in the Buda Castle. As a professor at the Institute of Archaeology of ELTE, and a founder of the Department of Medieval and Early Modern Archaeology, he promoted and taught a complex method of inquiry, which became a lingua franca of the ‘Kubinyi school.’ The outcome of the above mentioned project of economic history was a multi-authored monograph published first in Hungarian, then in English. Most chapters were written by Kubinyi’s former pupils, representing various subdisciplines. Professor Kubinyi, however, did not live to see these results: he passed away in 2007.