David Czvittinger

* Selmecbánya, 1676 – † Selmecbánya, 18 March 1743 / literary historian, bibliographer ; ; His family was granted nobility relatively late, in 1657. He started his schooling in his hometown, and from 1696 he studied at German universities (in Berlin, Strasbourg, Tübingen), and spent a particularly long time in Altdorf (between 1701 and 1714), where he got into debt and was imprisoned for this. In addition to his theological studies, he was interested in literary life. He is credited with the first significant attempt to collect data on the lives and work of Hungarian writers. In his work Specimen Hungariae Literatae (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1711), he lists nearly 300 Hungarian, Transylvanian, Croatian and Dalmatian writers in alphabetical order. It was on the basis of this work that the foreign scientific world paid attention to Hungarian literature, and its data – many of which were erroneous – were used by the editors of foreign encyclopedias. The length of the entries it published was not always proportional to the importance of the author under discussion, but rather reflected the amount of data available to it.