The history of Hungarian Jesuits is a challenge. While most of their writings may be in Latin, the fathers of the Society were the earliest advocates of Magyar as a literary language. Moreover, to tackle modern scholarship, one needs to consult works in German, Hungarian, and Slovak. Extant manuscripts are scattered in many archives and libraries, from Rome, the headquarters of the Society, to Vienna and Budapest, the former imperial and present national capitals, Košice in Slovakia, and Alba Iulia (Cluj) in Romania, erstwhile regional centers of the Jesuit enterprise. Readers, therefore, should be grateful for the scholarship and hard work of Peter Shore, author of a study on the Jesuits of Bohemia, who has turned his erudition to this new subject.

Before the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, Hungarian Jesuits did not form their own province. As orphans of a destroyed and torn polity, they were subjects of the Habsburg crown and belonged to the Austrian Province of the Society. Despite a strong sentiment for separation, increasingly so in the eighteenth century, the Hungarians remained in the Austrian province, finding in Habsburg rule the best practical arrangement, not the perfect ideal, for guaranteeing both a Catholic and a political identity for the Hungarian nation. That nation itself was of course divided into three parts: Royal Hungary under Habsburg rule, Transylvania under a native but Protestant dynasty, and territories under Ottoman occupation. In this tripartite power play, the Jesuits fought for the Habsburg-Catholic cause, as chaplains in the imperial armies, as religious pioneers in newly conquered territories, heavy with nonbelievers and slight with Catholic institutions, and as missionaries into areas beyond the military control of the Habsburgs. Shore's study focuses on the last two groups, hence the title of his book, Narratives of Adversity. The mission entrusted to the mostly Hungarian-speaking Jesuits on the eastern fringes of the Habsburg monarchy was hardly a propitious one. They faced hostile or indifferent peoples: in Upper Hungary or Slovakia, largely Lutheran, Slovak- and German-speaking with a significant presence of Ruthenian Uniates; in Belgrade, Serbian, orthodox, and anti-Habsburg; in Transylvania, a bewildering diversity of Calvinists, Lutherans, Unitarians, Anabaptists, Muslims, and Romanian Orthodox.

“Adversity” is very much the mood of many Jesuit reports. In choosing this term, Shore tries to address the duality of his historical sources. Jesuit history is impossible without Jesuit sources. Yet, the litterae annuae, the Historia Collegii, and the personal letters of the fathers all conformed to a universalist mode, created by the leadership of the Society and maintained by the strong corporate culture of the Jesuits. While deconstructing the discursive commonplaces of Jesuit writing, which tell us about Jesuit culture everywhere, Shore also extracts many items that pertain to the areas he studies: There are interesting cases of the conversion of Muslims and Roma, and of the opposition of Calvinists and Lutherans. The dialectic between discourse analysis and historical reconstruction, between a universalist Jesuit culture and the specificity of the Hungarian region informs this book. The first two chapters introduce the nature of the sources and the setting; chapters 3 and 4 turn to specific locations, focusing on Košice and Prešov in Slovakia; the next three chapters (5–7) switch back to thematic analysis and present interesting material on sex, demons, internal dissent, suffering, and opposition drawn from the plays written and performed in the Hungarian Jesuit colleges and in the annual reports and letters of individual Jesuits; chapter 8 is devoted to Jesuit communities in small towns, namely, Banská Bystrica, Kláštor pod Znievom, Sárospatak, and Levoča; chapter 9 deals with Jesuit historians who made major contributions to Hungarian historiography; chapters 10 and 11 revert to a focus on place, where Shore describes the unsuccessful Jesuit mission to Belgrade and their major training center in Trnava.

The complexity of the topic and the richness of research should be evident from this schematic summary. It is impossible in a short review to represent adequately the fruits of Shore's research. In addition to conversion, missions, confessional conflict, Narratives of Adversity also offers important insights into national tensions (between Austrian and Hungarian, Hungarian and Slovak) and the contrast between the more cosmopolitan culture of the Jesuits centered on Vienna and the provincial exigencies of the eastern peripheries of the Habsburg realm. In an insightful conclusion (chapter 12), Shore offers an interpretation of the transformation of that contrast, as the Hungarian Jesuit mission evolved from that of a heroic frontier endeavor to a routinized provincial backwater.

This is a fine work of scholarship. All it needs is a map.