Methodological Volumes on Geography Teaching in the Ghyczy Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Parliament: Part 1

Abstract

The private family library of Ignác Ghyczy (1799–1870), a book collector from Komárom and twice elected member of the Parliament, is both thematically and linguistically extensive and complex. In the first part of this two-part study, I present a volume on geographic education methodology from the Ghyczy collection of the Library of the Hungarian Parliament, by the German pedagogue Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths (1759–1839) and Johann Gottfried Lüdde (1799–?), a German geography teacher and geographer. Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths offers in his work Versuch einer Methodik des geographischen Unterrichts… (1835) new methodological proposals for the teaching of geography. Johann Gottfried Lüdde’s book Die Methodik der Erdkunde… (1842) was intended to contribute to improving the method of teaching geography. In my study, I present these volumes and their authors' ideas on the methodology of geography education and their intellectual horizons. I also seek to answer the question of what role these volumes may have played in Ignác Ghyczy’s education.