Nemzeti eredetkérdések és historiográfi ai viták. Hunfalvy Pál és a Századok

The fifteen years of Századok, the first professional historical review in Hungary, after 1875, constitutes one of the most exciting periods of its entire history in terms of both content and quality. It was during this period that some one and a half dozen papers were published in the review by Pál Hunfalvy, who nowadays is mostly remembered as a linguist, or occasionally an ethnologist. His activity as a historian, on the other hand, has almost completely gone into oblivion, although he was an active participant is several scholarly debates of his age. While his interest in history had been constant since young age, it was only in the last decades of his life that he began to publish specifically historical works. In this respect, his chef-d’oeuvre is the "(Historical) Ethnography of Hungary”, published in 1876, in which he examined the ethnogenesis of all ethnic groups in Hungary, with a special emphasis on that of the Hungarians and the Romanians. His works in Századok clearly outline those three main topics that otherwise attracted most of his attention,and exerted the greatest influence on posterity: a demonstration of the basic Finno-Ugric stratum of the Hungarian language and ethnos, a rejection of Hungarian-Hunnic kinship and thus of Hunnic-Székely ethnic continuity, and an effort to prove, on the basis of linguistic and legal history, of the Balkan origins of the Romanians. In its complexity, Hunfalvy’s oeuvre also reveals several contradictions within the complicated relationship between a gradually professionalizing historiography and the emergence of the nation state in Hungary