Lea Ráskay
Lea Ráskay (early 16th century, sometimes also spelled Ráskai, Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈleɒ ˈraːʃkɒi]) was a Hungarian Dominican nun living in the monastery of the Hare Island (today Margaret Island, Budapest). She was highly learned and well read, and is famous for copying several Hungarian codices that without her work would not have survived, among them the one she is most known for: the Legend of Saint Margaret, about Saint Margaret of Hungary who lived in the same monastery three hundred years before Ráskay.
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[edit] Life
Ráskay was likely a descendant of that old Hungarian aristocratic family which got its name after the village of Ráska, and until the end of the 16th century, held important positions in the courts of the Kings of Hungary. She designated her life to writing in the scriptorium of the monastery, and was the librarian of the facility, possibly between 1510 and 1527, according to her notes in specific codices. She also worked as a secretary, as a manuscript written in the name of Ilona Bocskay is known from her. With her collaborators, Ráskay was working on more books simultaneously. In 1529, when the monastery was evacuated because of the danger of the Ottoman forces, she fled, but took the most important codices to a safe place.
[edit] Works
All the below works were written in Hungarian.
- Legend of Saint Margaret (1510; copied from a lost codex of the 14th century)
- parts of the Codex Cornides (1514–1519
- Codex Domokos (1517)
- parts of the Codex Jordánszky (1519)
- parts of the Old Testament
- The Gospels
- Codex Horvát (1522)
