As in the popular television show X-Files, ‚the truthis out there’ could be the motto for the narrative of the event analysed in this study: on a still and sunny day in the spring of 1605, several people alleged to have seen a miraculous celestial beam of light accompanied with a horrible explosion in the vicinity of the villages Apagy and Nagykálló in Szabolcs county. The event itself was recorded by three contemporary authors. Péter Alvinczi, a Calvinist minister “commuting” between Kassa and Nagyvárad; Máté Szepsi Laczkó, another Calvinist living in Erdőbénye, and later Sárospatak; and the Jesuit missionary Gergely Vásárhelyi, who was active in Upper Hungary and the Transdanubian region. The study primarily focuses on the types of text organised into a unit by an event (in this case the observation of a supernatural phenomenon) and the ways this text formulates its own context. Another question is how this event infiltrates the biography of an aristocratic family, specifically that of István Báthory, and the collective memory concerning the news of his death. The study also discusses the principles at work in the selection of news based on eyewitness accounts, and the ways these correspond with the authors’ narratives. How does the public sphere operate and how are the texts used as a representation of the authors’ own individual and group interests?

Both demonology and medical learning wanted to define what material evidence they were to use in order to alleviate the politically rooted disease-symptoms of the early modern period. Finding the proper therapeutic treatment required the apt description of the pathology, revealing the causes and consequences, and making the right diagnosis. In relation to these requirements several key questions were formulated. Is it possible to infer the existence of demons from the fact that everyday objects (pots and dishes) started to shake? And vice versa, can the inexplicable “behaviour” of these objects indicate the existence of demons, devils or Satan himself, and their temptations? Is it possible to explain the strange illnesses that bear peculiar characteristics similar to that caused by the operation of witches or, on the contrary, do the odd and “miraculous” symptoms prove witches’ activity? Are demons capable to establish physical, sexual relationships with human beings, especially with women, to beget children as a tangible result of such relationships? If such children, that is, monstrous or deformed beings are born, are they indicative of Satan’s involvement in their conception? Can ghosts returning from Purgatory, or the living dead attest to their temptations or their presence in this world with material evidence? Or should we better interpret these phenomena the other way round, supposing that the material objects concerning the temptations of this world may indicate the existence of Purgatory or the activity of the living dead? Are there any prophetical signs about the end of the world or are they known only from Biblical traditions and prophecies? Or is the opposite true? If eschatological signs appear, are they to be interpreted as evidence for the impending end of the world? Most of the questions formulated this way are based on such a formal syllogism that responds to the normative requests of disciplines that include law, theology and medicine; and whose formal elements became valid within the systems of fulfillment that these disciplines have themselves. In this paper I attempt to introduce the scholarly literature based on these formal logical criteria that address material evidence, omens, prophecies, oracles and miracles. I conlude my essay with the overview of how this debate in European secondary literature has been received in Hungarian scholarship.

Words like aggression, violence, and violent actions usually carry destructive meanings. People tend to forget their constructive culturally determined meanings. In spite of this, it cannot be argued that aggressive feelings, hatred, anger, verbal aggression, threatening behaviour, assault, giving pain, injuring or ritual killing of men, or the fights of war are all part of our lives like feasts and rituals that keep communities together, or the order of love by different religious ideologies. In the 16th century there was a definitive turn in judging the body in public. It meant that public attention gradually turned to the thieves’ body from the corpse of Christ. The two thieves came down from their crosses, laid down on the dissecting table, or their bodies were torn apart during fights. Rascals became part of scientific cognition. Antisocial public enemy turned to be a hero of the community in the pitaval-literature and historic stories. The conserved and stuffed body of the robbers and killers were displayed at the first museums of the Early Modern Age, as a main attraction. The rebels were cut into pieces as a part of a baroque play on the killing floor to display the parts in buildings of the town. The body of the everyday killer became a spectacle, and the interest in the mind of the solitary killer developed the medical thinking of the human spirit.