SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 756 Secondly, the book proposes a regional framework for understanding medieval law and institutions, explicitly moving away from the nation-state as a frame of reference. The introduction in particular spells out the basic incongruity of a national framework with the reality of medieval social and political structures. This is a book that is equally relevant and enlightening for the student of the medieval period and of modern nationalism. University of Leicester Irina Marin Ardelean, Florin; Nicholson, Christopher and Preiser-Kapeller, Johannes (eds). Between Worlds: The Age of the Jagiellonians. Eastern and Central European Studies, 2. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2013. 227 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £33.60. Pop, Ioan-Aurel. ‘De manibus Vallachorum schismaticorum…’ Romanians and Power in the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary (The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries). Eastern and Central European Studies, 4. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2013. 516 pp. Chronology. Bibliography. Sources. Historiography. €79.40: £64.00. Pop, Ioan-Aurel. Cultural Diffusion and Religious Reformation in SixteenthCentury Transylvania: How the Jesuits Dealt with the Orthodox and Catholic Ideas. With a Foreword by Norman Housley. Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, NY, Queenston, ON and Lampeter, 2014. iii + 217 pp. Bibliography. Index. £99.95: $149.95. The series Eastern and Central European Studies began in 2012 and has already reached its fourth volume. Under the overall editorship of Christian Gastgeber and Alexandru Simon it is a product of the increasingly prolific ‘Cluj stable’, loosely organized around the Centre for Transylvanian Studies and the Transylvanian Review. The second and fourth volumes, which have been received by the SEER office, are reviewed here. The two other volumes are dedicated to Italian relations with Europe’s eastern borderlands, and by way of a Festschrift for Paolo Odorico, to aspects of Byzantine history, Greek texts and their transmission, and everyday life in and around medieval Constantinople. The second volume of the series comprises a miscellaneous collection of fourteen chapters, mainly by younger scholars, on Eastern Europe from the late fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries. The individual contributions are of a universally high standard, although their larger significance is not always made clear. They include several studies on Transylvanian history (by Marco Bogade and Liviu Cîmpeanu), on military history (by Florin Ardelean and Mark Whelan), on Poland and Lithuania (by Julia Dücker, Guillaume Durand, and Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, the last of whom addresses Byzantine overtures REVIEWS 757 to the pagan Lithuanian ‘grand prince of the fire-worshippers’), on diplomatic and legal relations involving Moldavia (by Ioan-Aurel Pop, Adinel Dincă and Alexandru Simon) and on the Muscovite church (by Basil Lourié). Several contributions include the texts of hitherto unpublished correspondence (by Alexandru Simon and Christian Gastgeber). Adrian Magina provides a useful chronology of the Serbian settlement in the Banat, which he indicates had a profound effect upon the ethnic composition and confessional character of this part of the Hungarian kingdom. Christopher Nicholson situates the Bohemian diet within an ambitious comparative perspective that takes in Hintze, Russocki and Blockmans. Michaela Bodnárová gives us valuable new information on the Hungarian coronations of 1490, 1508 and 1527 (although curiously not of 1526). The editors have done a fine job in rendering the contributions into flawless English, German and French. The volume, however, desperately needs an introduction which puts the chapters in the larger context of Jagiello Europe and thus discloses their importance, as well as an index. Ioan-Aurel Pop’s history of the Romanians in Transylvania during the later Middle Ages is the fourth volume in the series. More than five hundred pages long, De manibus Vallachorum schismaticorum is the most thorough and authoritative account of the subject available in any language. Pop points to the presence of Romanian political formations in the Carpathian region at the time of the Hungarian conquest, indicates their subsequent destruction and the gradual elimination of most of the indigenous Romanian nobility and communal organizations, and explains the marginalization of the Romanian population by reference to their schismatic, Orthodox beliefs, which rendered them outsiders — hence the title of his book. Pop’s account is supported by a welter of illustrations drawn from the contemporary sources and by digressions into medieval ethnicity, images...