Three decades and more of scholarship have now put the Observant reforms of religious life at the center of the history of Europe in the later Middle Ages. Within that wider field of study, scholars recognize the reforms that took root among the Franciscan order—a movement that produced Bernardino, Capistrano, and so many others—as exemplary. And while most work on the Franciscan Observants has traditionally focused on Italy (and to a lesser extent), France, and Germany, the importance of Franciscan reform across Central Europe, and Hungary in particular, has recently received greater attention. Unfortunately, several adverse conditions long hampered work in this time and place—not only the loss of original source material in the wake of Ottoman rule, but also the various language barriers between modern scholarly traditions, as well as a lack of modern scholarly editions. This project offers a substantial and multifaceted remedy to that neglect.

The focus of Antal Molnár's fine edition is a corpus of neglected but rich source material from Franciscan Observant circles, collections of texts called formularies. Long known and well studied for the Middle Ages generally, these were compilations of letters, decrees, and other documents whose language and structure were, for any number of reasons, chosen as useful models for reproduction within various institutional contexts. Here we have a collection of model Latin letters, some 900 in all, produced within the chancellery of the Hungarian Franciscan Observants from the middle of the fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth.

Molnár frames the texts with an introduction so thorough that it can itself be seen as a substantial scholarly achievement. It begins with larger contexts. As the subject of modern scholarly study for over a century, formularies have long been known for the rich insights they provide about the norms, concepts, language, and routines of the institutions that used them. Insofar as they also preserve copies of unique documents, they are valuable for the crucial glimpses of historical particulars that they capture, often by accident. Building on this tradition of scholarship, especially the recent work of Klaus Schreiner and others, the introduction stresses the key context of “pragmatic literacy” in the medieval religious orders. In their ranks, reading, writing, copying, and compiling were central to daily life, especially in the realms of devotion, pastoral care, and reformed discipline. And among the orders it was the Franciscan Observants, Molnár rightly stresses, who arguably used the technologies, efficiencies, and energies of administrative literacy to greatest effect. Long before the Jesuits, so famous for the intensity and thoroughness of their disciplined life and administration, the Observant followers of Francis melded lives of pastoral care and devotion, legislation, and “management” in lasting ways. And it is in their formulary collections that we see, in all its richness, their mastery of routine—the training of novices, routines of profession and consecration, education and moral formation, discipline and punishment, economic life and material culture, death and remembrance.

In the case of Hungary, where the loss of medieval manuscripts and documents has been so severe, it is precisely this kind of routine administrative material that survives in relative abundance. Formularies in Hungary survive from royal, episcopal, ecclesiastical, and local settings, but they often survive in the greatest numbers from the religious orders. The book's introduction offers a detailed survey of these contexts. It then turns to the formulary collections that form the foundations of this edition. There are four in all, each of which receives a thorough codicological description and contextualization. The details on offer here are too rich to summarize easily. By way of illustration, we can note only the third collection of the four presented here, a miscellany from Gyöngyös, that stands as the most crucial and complex manuscript in this edition. Molnár's survey makes clear how this collection of legal and historical materials, in both print and manuscript, reflected the many tensions within the order as it came together (c. 1510–17) at the height of intense internal controversy among the Franciscans.

The introduction's final major section offers a thematic exploration of some of the key areas these sources illuminate. They disclose much, for example, about the daily economic life of the Franciscans in this period. Some show how brothers in poor or hard-pressed houses secured food, wine, cloth, and other material support from more secure ones. Others reveal vital clues regarding material culture and commerce: production of and traffic in mundane commodities like oil, cloth, sandals, or books; the daily work of tailors, smiths, cobblers, and carpenters. These documents both confirm and nuance current understandings of the wider upheavals of the era. Franciscan ties to the peasant uprisings so masterfully studied by Jenő Szűcs, for example, appear more complex than before in light of these formularies. Well-documented routines also reveal the Franciscans’ relentlessly pragmatic stance in the face of Ottoman conquest. We encounter detailed instructions regarding when and how best to retreat, to safeguard and transport valuables and goods, to avoid harm, and to rebuild and resettle whenever it became possible.

The edition that follows the introduction, nearly 500 pages in all, is a monumental achievement. It upholds the highest scholarly standards, and the fresh source material it makes available promises to be of great interest not only to scholars of religious life, but to historians of Central Europe in the later medieval and early modern eras generally. As Molnár insightfully notes, these formularies, so seemingly uninteresting at first glance, in fact capture the richness of an entire era through an institutional lens. It is a point that those who labor away in any modern university setting might appreciate: how our most pragmatic texts, our “boiler plate” language and routine documentation, for all their banality, capture information far beyond the routines of administration. Read carefully, they also offer glimpses of the spirit and culture of an institution, and the daily life that its members, so often otherwise invisible, aspire to influence.