Biblical mythisation in Štefan Pilárik’s autobiographical writing

The life of the Slovak Protestant priest and Baroque period author Štefan Pilárik (1615 – 1693) was filled with hardships. Pilárik was forced to convert by the Jesuits – and several times during his life at that –, in 1663, he was captured by the Tatars and Turks, and at the time the Protestant priests were persecuted, he was forced to leave the country. Pilárik described his sufferings in three texts bearing Latin titles: Sors Pilarikiana (1666), a poem written in Slovakized Czech and in German-language proses Currus Jehovae mirabilis (1678) and Turcico-Tartarica crudelitas (1684). These autobiographical stories are rare examples of early modern period autobiographical ego-documents written in the Kingdom of Hungary. As to the form and content, they followed the 17th-century Protestant preaching practice – the rhetorical and homiletic ways of creating the texts of sermon literature. The author was familiar with the inventive, dispositional, and elocutionary devices of the Lutheran homiletics and exegesis as formed by the Protestant theologians Philipp Melanchthon (1497 – 1560) and Andreas Gerhard Hyperius (1511 – 1564) and made them part of the systematising, interpretational, and expressive means he employed in his literary works