Central European Cultures 5, no. 1 (2025): 277–283 doi.org/10.47075/CEC.2025-1.14 CE C Central European Cultures The Formula Collections of the Franciscan Observants in Hungary (ca. 1451–1554). By Antal Molnár Rome: Quaracchi, 2022. 773. pp. Farkas Gábor Kiss Institute of Hungarian Literature and Cultural Studies, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, 4/A Múzeum körút, 1088 Budapest, Hungary; kiss.farkas@btk.elte.hu; IFIS PAN, Nowy Świat 72, 00-330 Warszawa, Poland; farkas.kiss@ifispan.edu.pl e huge, folio-sized volume of Antal Molnár, with its more than 900 pages, evokes the memory of Baroque publications. e German title, in an unpretentious-look- ing Italian ecclesiastical series, on a Hungarian subject, will obviously not tempt the uninformed foreign reader to plunge into the work and discover the treasures it holds in store. Yet the volume is a treasure trove: a masterpiece of more than 10 years’ work—it offers the reader new discoveries page aſter page, which do not simply add to the professional opinio communis, but make new propositions on fundamental issues, hidden in single declarative sentences, with the usual modesty associated with the author’s style. e volume is divided into two larger parts: the almost 200 pages of the introduction summarize all that is known about the surviving formularies of the Observant Franciscan Vicariate (then Province from 1517) in Hungary. e author examines this using the broadest possible approach: on the one hand, the intro- duction gives a detailed account of the current state of research on medieval letter collections (formularies), and on the other hand, it provides an overview of Western European (German, Italian, French) research on similar letter collections. us, this part of the volume can be read as a monograph on the recent revival of studies on formularies, following the outstanding earlier research of György Bónis. Antal Molnár approaches this field with a much broader focus than most of the Hungarian or even international scholarship, and takes into account the history of Polish prag- matic literacy, which is perhaps typologically closest to that of Hungary in terms of alphabetization and the spread of vernacular writing. To the uninitiated reader, the aim of the volume seems to be to rewrite the history of the Franciscan order in Hungary, as if Antal Molnár’s work were a contin-