For centuries, the story of religious life's institutions was written by and for the men and women of the religious orders themselves. Even with the advent of professional history in the nineteenth century, the story of the orders was one that largely looked inward. Only in the last half century have secular scholars begun in earnest to study the orders from beyond and across the old institutional boundaries. Kaspar Elm, Gert Melville, and their students, Constance Proksch, Anne Winston Allen, and Bert Roest, among many others, have all shown how writing of history in the religious orders was connected to larger cultural dynamics, especially the formation of community and institutional or corporate identity.

Anne Huijbers's Zealots for Souls now takes its place among these recent works, offering as its contribution an investigation of the late-medieval historiographical traditions of the Dominican order from the late fourteenth through the early sixteenth centuries. In doing so, it extends the chronological horizons of a Dominican tradition still largely focused on the thirteenth century, and thus offers another valued contribution to our recent efforts to recover the complexity, vitality, and energy of fifteenth century culture through the lens of its religious orders.

Huijbers advances a rigorously structured, systematic exploration of this topic in three parts. Part 1 surveys the themes, methods, and genres of Dominican historiography. Huijbers illustrates the Dominicans’ creativity in selecting, compiling, adapting, and translating older materials in new circumstances. She also adopts an appropriately flexible stance with regard to authorship and genre. We encounter in these works not the accomplishments of individual authors but a collective, additive project, whose many iterations reflected and shaped a Dominican corporate identity. In chapters devoted to both “order chronicles” (focused on the general history of the institution) and “convent chronicles” (focused on specific houses, male as well as female), Huijbers emphasizes the sheer variety of aims, source materials, and structures we encounter in these texts, as well as how their authors expanded and refined the work of their predecessors. The German reformer Johannes Meyer (d. 1485), to note only one of many examples, began his Buch der reformacio predigerordens as a local history of the community of Schonensteinbach that both built on his female and male predecessors and also worked to interweave the local story with the broader horizons of Observant reform. The work provided later generations of reformed nuns (and some lay audiences) with a series of edifying readings, as well as an opportunity to continue the story (later women at St. Gall and Nuremberg, for example, reworked and rearranged Meyer's material to suit their own needs). A final chapter in part 1 turns to collective biography. In ways that strongly paralleled the works of contemporary humanists, Dominican authors crafted narratives De viris illustribus, offering serial biographical portraits as moral exemplars. Huijbers emphasizes, again, the range of possibilities. The categories and organizing principles were flexible, the boundaries of genre permeable, and the results often unexpected. By the end of the fifteenth century, the order's historians often elided or played down earlier tensions and controversies over Observant reform, for example, and also refused (however surprisingly to modern readers) to focus on inquisitors as a distinct category of exemplary friars.

Part 2 focuses on the pivotal fifteenth-century contests over the meaning and practice of “observance,” and how various factions shaped their identities around that issue through new narratives. Chapter 6 explores how, as the complexities of the era of the Schism and Constance fostered widespread perceptions of decline, Observant reformers both called for reform in their treatises and histories and reclaimed and reshaped the past and to legitimate their efforts. The result was a distinctly Observant stamp on Dominican institutional narratives generally, one that was cautious to work toward unity and to avoid the divisive extremes that had torn apart the Franciscan order. Chapter 7 investigates more deeply the narrative strategies that Observant Dominicans deployed to reinforce their new reforming identity. Above all, they shaped pasts that stressed the importance of study and learning in a spirit of utility and humility; the importance of remaining true to the pristine example of St. Dominic; the virtues and impact of Observant Dominicans as “zealots for souls,” exemplary preachers and teachers in a fallen world; their embrace of purity and even martyrdom in the name of reform.

Part 3 offers one chapter on the intersections of Dominican historiography with the intellectual currents of humanism. It focuses on the collective biographies of Tomasso Schifaldo, Giovanni Caroli, and Leandro Alberti. In the spirit of recent works by Alison Frazier and David Collins, among others, Huijbers rejects the facile dichotomies that have long separated ostensibly “secular” humanism from religious life, and of sharp dichotomies between “medieval” and “Renaissance” authors. In the works of these friars (and in Alberti's case that of several lay collaborators) we see all the hallmarks of a seemingly new era—classicizing style, republican sensibilities, and authorial self-consciousness and self-promotion. Yet these authors built on the textual foundations of their many medieval predecessors and shared the same broad aim—the shaping of collective identity through exemplary lives. Huijbers then concludes her study with a helpful catalogue of the authors, texts, and editions studied in the book, as well as three appendices. The first offers a brief gesture to the fate of Dominican chronicles in the sixteenth century. The second offers a sample text from a Dominican chronicle, an odd story of friar's suicide before the altar in Ulm. A third offers a brief genealogical table from the later fifteenth century.

Scholars even within the religious orders, to say nothing of those beyond, long dismissed the works under discussion here. Their tendency to moralizing and exemplarity, seemingly banal commonplaces and ideal categories, to say nothing of their derivative and deprived aesthetic quality, all rendered them uninteresting and all but historically useless to earlier generations of scholars. Anne Huijbers careful and thorough monograph is an excellent first step toward breathing new life into these works. It invites not only further study in to the texts catalogued here, but future work that links the central theme of narrative and identity formation to other circles and settings across the religious orders.