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earlier notions about the mediaeval ‘arsenal of benedictions’ having declined in
Hungary. Not only were mediaeval texts transmitted, but new blessings were
constantly being created and old ones were brought in line with the times. Com¬
parative examination of the material shows that there are not many texts that
were originally created in Hungary, it is more realistic to speak of a kind of Cen¬
tral European stock of texts. The source works for these benedictions, besides a
number of unidentified mediaeval sources, were probably those large collections
which enjoyed broad popularity all over Europe and which were closely tied in
with monastic practice. These include Rituale Franciscanum (1685) published by
Czech Franciscan Bernardus Sannig which ran into a number of editions and
contained as many as 150 benedictions, or Gelasio di Cilia’s Locupletissimus the¬
saurus (1709) which contained 176 benedictions. The international character of
blessings was confirmed, besides being in Latin, by references which showed that
names of saints referred to in the texts were freely interchangeable, and the names
of such saints as were popular in the country and region of the users could be free¬
ly inserted. In the case of some types of blessings, in the more fortunate cases, we
can trace the windy tracks of dissemination within the monastic order and of cop¬
ying by hand. In the early 20" century, noted folklore scholar Lajos Katona found
a MS containing anti-demon procedures (a text which blessed the protective piece
of paper, the seal, pen and ink alike) in the Franciscan monastery of Gyöngyös as
an ethnographic curiosity. The contents of the book actually came from Sannig’s
above mentioned collection and were copied out and disseminated in the mid¬
18th century. Data in the context of the ‘storm candles’ (Wetterkerzen) which
would be blessed on the day of martyrs St. John and Paul (June 26") also point to
a Czech origin; while the ritual of blessing bread on the day of St. Augustine (Feb¬
ruary 5'") to protect against fire, has Czech and Polish/Lithuanian parallels. The
latter blessing is also interesting because in this case we are not talking about a
mediaeval benediction but a type of text which emerged in the 16" century and
clearly grew widespread in the Franciscan practice of Central Europe. Its popular
ity in Hungary declined as the cult of Florian, the saint who protects from fire, be¬
gan to spread in the 18" century, but in Franciscan areas of influence they sur
vived right until the time of the folklore collections of the early 20" century.
The volume devotes a separate chapter to the problem of the early modern
formal variants of anti-demon exorcism. Here the emphasis is mainly on liturgi¬
cal respects. The ceremony of the clerical ‘cure’ of possession by the devil, after
the Roman fashion, first appears in Pázmánys Esztergom book of ritual. It is this
rite which is then borrowed by a number of printed books of rituals in Hungary.
Besides the official ritual of so-called ‘major exorcism’, there were also a number
of ‘alternative’ manuals circulating for the expulsion of demons. Several texts
from the two-volume manual of Hieronymus Mengus (Flagellum daemonum, Fus¬
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