Farkas Gábor Kiss Transmission and Transformation of Knowledge: Valentine Nádasdi’s Miscellany from the University of Paris or the Chances of Christian Kabbalah and Neoplatonism on the Ottoman Frontier Abstract: This chapter analyses a miscellaneous manuscript of a 16th century Franciscan, Valentine Nádasdi, and interprets its contents in the light of the possi- bilities and limits of knowledge transmission between central and peripheral knowledge communities. Nádasdi moved between Paris, and the border zone of Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. In France, he collected books during his studies, and made compilations from his readings, which he tried to make use of in Hun- garyas a preacher. While acting in an overwhelmingly Protestant country, he tried to engage his readers with his new cultural ideas (e.g. Christian Kabbalah) by re- contextualizing these texts as model letters and preaching. I argue that his main strategy of knowledge transmission was a “covert recontextualization” of his cul- tural ideals, in which he tried to avoid confessional conflicts and reframed their original arguments in a covert form to save their contents. 1 Introduction: A Franciscan Miscellany from the Mid-16 th Century This chapter analyses a miscellaneous manuscript of a 16 th century Observant Franciscan, Valentine (Bálint) Nádasdi, now kept in the Hungarian National Li- brary (Oct. Lat. 1220), and interprets its contents in the light of the possibilities and limits of knowledge transmission between central and peripheral knowledge communities (lieux de savoir). Nádasdi, the manuscript’s owner, moved between Paris, one of the centers of 16 th century scholarship and the border zone of Eastern Hungary, Transylvania, and the Ottoman Empire. In Paris, he collected books, which he imported to his home country, and made different kinds of compilations Farkas Gábor Kiss: ORCID: 0000-0002-8632-5855. Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. This research has been made possible thanks to ERC Consolidator Grant n. 864542, “From East to West, and Back Again: Student Travel and Transcultural Knowledge Production in Renaissance Europe (c. 1470–c. 1620).” Open Access. © 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111072722-009