Reviewed by: Confraternity, Mendicant Orders, and Salvation in the Middle Ages: The Contribution of the Hungarian Sources (c. 1270–c. 1530) by Marie-Madeleine de Cevins Robert Curry Cevins, Marie-Madeleine de, Confraternity, Mendicant Orders, and Salvation in the Middle Ages: The Contribution of the Hungarian Sources (c. 1270–c. 1530), trans. Iris Black (Europa Sacra, 23), Turnhout, Brepols, 2018; hardback; pp. xvii, 365; 22 b/w illustrations, 2 maps, 14 graphs, 2 b/w tables; R.R.P. €100.00; ISBN 9782503578712. Mendicant spiritual confraternities have a bad reputation and the very term, so Marie-Madeleine de Cevins cheerfully forewarns us, inevitably engenders a certain malaise in the reader. Her dense, detailed and exhaustively researched study of an undoubtedly complex and poorly documented topic takes us into the competitive world of the medieval mendicants (Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinian Hermits and Carmelites) and shines light onto a practice they deliberately kept obscure. To meet their communal material needs, friars needed benefactions. Benefactors, to be encouraged, needed to be recompensed. In effecting recompense, the friars needed to tread warily to obviate accusations of simony that would sully the [End Page 193] essence of their appeal, their commitment to poverty. And so, in exchange for material benefits, the friars promised spiritual graces (bona spiritualia) accrued by their community, the incalculable value of which was ever accumulating. In this way, their unwritten indebtedness was discharged in the manner sanctioned by Rome (Urban V’s bull, Beneficia sanctorum). Confirmation of membership of a spiritual confraternity took the form of a formal letter, a charter, the wording of which was largely formulaic and changed little over the centuries: ‘I, Friar […], hereby receive you into each and every suffrage of our Order, and into its confraternity, in life as in death, granting to you by the present document full participation in all the spiritual wealth that the clemency of the Saviour shall judge our brothers of the Kingdom of Hungary worthy to achieve’ (Franciscan, c. 1282–1320). Membership entailed no ceremony of inclusion; no lists of members were kept; and no active solidarity was cultivated between confratres/consorores and the friars. In essence, mendicant spiritual confraternities were conceptual communities. And therein lies the challenge for the researcher: How to investigate a topic, amorphous in nature, the formal evidence for which is a repetitive monotony? The phenomenon was by no means restricted to any one part of Europe; to date, however, the richest cache of inventoried material is found in Hungary. To these Hungarian sources, rarely discussed in West European languages, Cevins brings an impressive breadth of scholarship, the fruits of more than two decades’ research into Hungarian and Central-European ecclesiastical archives. She makes the point that while the mendicants were strongly represented in Hungary, they did not indulge in actively selling letters of affiliation of the ‘fill-in-the-blanks’-type that was common in England and Bohemia. As a consequence, Hungarian spiritual confraternities retained their currency for longer. Cevins’s study provides fascinating glimpses into how the orders projected themselves to the faithful. We see, for example, the vigorous support of spiritual confraternities provided by the Inquisitor-General of Franciscan Observants, John of Capistrano, during his high-profile tour of Central Europe: ‘engaged in a fierce struggle against heresy and the infidels, [he] made spiritual confraternity into a weapon of “conquering pastoral care”’ (p. 193). His letters of affiliation make clear that admission to the Franciscan confraternity is to be understood as admission to the Three Orders of St Francis—nota bene—de Observantia: the Friars Minor of the Observance, the Sisters Minor of St Clare, that is, Damianites of the Observance [sororum minorissarum et sancte Clare seu sancti Damiani de Observancia], and the Third Order Penitents. At the time of his writing, however, the majority of Poor Clare houses in Central Europe, the grand foundations especially, were aligned with the Franciscan Conventuals. For their part, the Conventual Franciscans, with their calls to ‘follow, naked, the naked Christ’ (p. 191), were striving to present themselves as more reformed than the Observants. And although confraternal bona spiritualia extended equally to women and men, not a single abbess or [End Page 194] prioress appears in the role...