The Raven & the CrownA holló és a korona

The book

The Raven & the Crown

The Rise of the Hunyadi and the Reign of Matthias Corvinus

Author

L. S. Domonkos

Edited by

Aaron Voitus

Subject

Hungary in the fifteenth century

Publisher

Lulu

Cover art

Antal Ligeti, with figures by Alexander von Wagner

Cover layout

Aaron Voitus

Hardcover

978-0-557-97480-1

Paperback

978-0-557-95719-4

E-book

978-0-557-95771-2

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The author

Leslie (László) S. Domonkos was born in Budapest on 14 March 1938, was naturalised as an American citizen in 1959, and died on 8 May 2026. He took his A.B. at Youngstown State University and his M.A., M.S.M., and Ph.D. in medieval studies at the University of Notre Dame, with a Fulbright year at the University of Vienna in between.

He taught at Youngstown State for nearly four decades — instructor in 1964, professor of history from 1975, Distinguished Member of the Graduate Faculty from 1990, professor emeritus from 2002 — and returned repeatedly to Budapest as a visiting senior scholar at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, to whose Corporate Body he was elected in 2003.

His subject was the intellectual life of medieval and Renaissance Hungary: the founding of the universities at Óbuda and Pozsony, the humanists around János Vitéz and Janus Pannonius, and the court of Matthias Corvinus. With J. M. Bak and others he co-edited the bilingual Decreta Regni Mediaevalis Hungariae — the standard English edition of the laws of the medieval Hungarian kingdom.

Selected publications

• 1967Studium Generale: Studies Offered to A. L. Gabriel, co-editor
• 1986Louis the Great, King of Hungary and Poland, co-editor
• 1996–98The Laws of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, vols. I and III, co-editor
• 1979“János Vitéz, the Father of Hungarian Humanism, 1408–1472”

He compiled his own curriculum vitae on 24 January 2006. It lists this book, under its working title, as accepted by the Press of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences: “Chapters 1–22 complete; 23–4 in preparation.” Those are the two chapters he did not live to write.

The CV is printed in full at the back of the volume, exactly as he left it.

The manuscript

He wrote it by hand, on yellow legal pads, and filed it by chapter in a steel drawer. That is how it reached me. My father brought the boxes to Ohio for the funeral and I carried them home from there — folders marked in roman numerals, with older drafts of the same chapters filed alongside the later ones.

How the book was made

Not a rewrite. A recovery, done in order, with a record kept of every decision that was not purely mechanical.

1. Scan Over six hundred pages of handwriting scanned, page by page, into the computer.
2. Transcribe Each chapter transcribed from its scans, chapter by chapter, using Anthropic's Claude.
3. Minor corrections Spelling, missing Hungarian accents, and grammar were corrected in passing. Nothing larger.
4. Flag Anything beyond a minor fix was not repaired silently — it was written up as an issue against that chapter.
5. Adjudicate After each chapter was compiled I worked through its list of issues one at a time and decided each myself.
6. Fill the gaps Where the text was incomplete I went back through the older drafts for the missing passage, or researched the missing fact — a date, a name — until it could be supplied.
7. Typeset The finished text formatted into the publisher's PDF.
8. Cover I designed the layout of the front and rear covers. The painting is Antal Ligeti's Return of King Matthias from Hunting, 1872, with the figures by Alexander von Wagner — not my own work, and chosen because it shows Vajdahunyad, the seat of the family this book is about.
9. Proof Several drafts, corrected in turn, until the volume was final.

A note on method

Silent improvement is not editing — it is ventriloquism, and it is the one thing a posthumous edition must not do. The point of the whole exercise was to get his sentences into print, not better sentences.

A raven with a gold ring in its beak was the device of the house of Hunyadi. It is also a fair emblem for the work of carrying something out of a ruin.