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DAnıer BÄRTH Benediction and exorcism in early modern Hungary The present book is about the textual aspects of the sacramentals of the early modern Christian church. This is a subject area embedded in an inexhaustibly rich cultural historical context, which the volume will approach mostly along the criteria and questions of historical folklore. Naturally, this does not mean that this branch of studies has any kind of monopoly over this subject area, either in terms of exploring sources or in analysing them. The very complexity of the subject matter calls for an interdisciplinary approach which includes clerical and liturgical history, the branch of religious ethnography which focuses on the history of lay religiosity, research into popular beliefs and customs and (particularly as regards the complex question of ‘magic’), the criteria applied by the history of mentalities and by historical asnthropology. These approaches will be reflected both in the introductory essay and in the explanatory notes attached to the texts. The author of the volume has been engaged in studying the Hungarian and Central European aspects of the 16"-18'" century practice of benedictions and curses for over a decade. Within this, the focus is not on objective manifestations but primarily on the text of the rituals, as well as on their transmission, use, structure and their characteristics of form and content. Of all the textual elements of the rituals in question, excessive importance is attached to the positive texts of blessings (benedictions) and to the negative texts called curses (exorcisms). The former phrase is applied in clerical and scholarly usage mostly as a summary term to refer to rituals of this nature, while the term ‘exorcism’ is mostly used to refer to the ritual of curing demonic states of possession (so-called ‘major’ or ‘solemn’ exorcism). This is how the situation emerges whereby prayers of ‘minor’ or ‘simple exorcism’ sometimes occur in the sources as components of rites referred to as benediction. This is mainly what explains why both concepts are included in the title of the book despite that fact that major exorcism only appears in one subchapter which mainly focuses on presenting liturgical texts. The time boundaries of the present research effort are explained by the considerations set forth in the introductory essay. It is clear, however, that in order to understand the processes which took place in the early modern period, commonly perceived as the age of changes, we cannot avoid outlining the mediaeval practices, either. A brief look at the relevant phenomena of the later centuries seems appropriate to the predominance of the historical folklore approach ap439
