George Pray

* Érsekújvár, 11 September 1723 – † Pest, 23 September 1801 / Jesuit monk, historian ; ; His family came to the Upper Hungary from the German-speaking Tyrol, he had already completed his studies in various Hungarian cities after entering the Jesuit order in 1740. In 1742 he became a student at the University of Nagyszombat, took his theological examination in Eger and was ordained a priest in 1754. In the meantime, he taught in lower schools in various cities (Nagyvárad, Trencsén, Bratislava, Rozsnyó). For a few years he was an educator in Vienna and taught poetry in the Theresianum. In 1758–1759 he was a teacher in Győr, in 1759–1760 in Nagyszombat, and finally in Buda. ; The dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773 put him in a difficult financial situation, but he was helped by patrons, and then Maria Theresa appointed him as the royal historian of Hungary and in 1777 made him the first keeper of the University Library in Buda. In 1790, he was appointed a canon of Oradea, and from then on he was only concerned with historical research. From 1764 onwards, he consciously collected documents found in the archives and copied those that were essential to the topic. Over the course of three decades, he collected about sixty volumes of material and even exchanged data frequently. Thanks to this, he found the oldest Hungarian poem, Halotti beszéd és könyörgés, in the codex named after him, which was first published in print by János Sajnovics (1733–1785) in his Demonstratio Idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem esse, which discusses the relationship between the Hungarian and Lapp languages. in the second edition of his work, published in Nagyszombat in 1770. György Pray tried to publish the collected and arranged archival material, with due source criticism, and with the conscious application of the methods of documentology, chronology and genealogy. ; His main work is considered to be the summary entitled Annales regum Hungariae, published in five volumes between 1763 and 1770, in which he collected facts and data from the founding of the state to the death of Ferdinand of Habsburg in 1564. The continuation of the work was published in three volumes in 1801, in which he discusses events up to 1780. He collected and published the legends of some Hungarian royal saints (Erzsébet, Margit, Prince Saint Imre, King Ladislaus, and Saint Jobb). He established a kind of historical center in the University Library and his extensive correspondence also fulfilled the role of a non-existent historical journal. In 1780, he published the list and bibliographic description of the books and documents in the library (Index rariorum librorum Bibliothecae Universitatis Regiae Budensis) and also achieved that the library received all new publications in the form of legal deposit copies. He also played an important role in the fact that the libraries and manuscript materials of the dissolved monastic orders, as well as the huge Hevenes–Kaprina historical source collection, were acquired by the University Library and thus became researchable.