Scholarship abhors a vacuum; fortunately, Maria Crăciun and Elaine Fulton's edited volume fills an unsightly hole concerning the role of religious communities—Observant mendicants and Jesuits—in reforms throughout east central Europe between medieval and modern times. Reasons for the void in knowledge on this topic are numerous: difficulties in generating local scholarly interest on the topic until after the fall of communist eastern Europe; a paucity of source material; problems with grasping obscure historical religious and political loyalties; dealing with complex relationships between Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox groups; understanding unfamiliar religious movements, such as the Basilians and the Uniate Church; and negotiating a number of difficult eastern European languages.

Communities of Devotion, however, fills in many gaps by focusing upon the interactions between Observant Mendicant Orders, especially Franciscans (OFM)—and to a lesser extent Dominicans, only briefly mentioning Augustinians and Carmelites—and Jesuits with bishops and political authorities primarily in Transylvania, Austria, Hungary, and sometimes Bohemia. The overall interdisciplinary effort includes individual articles that are at times narrowly focused on a particular set of sources in order to make the distinct projects manageable. As a result, some of the assessments differ on how successful the mendicant and Jesuit missions to the east actually were in promoting Tridentine and other Roman Catholic Reforms. In the end, the whole of the book works together nicely to portray a nuanced, if still somewhat shadowy picture of an oft-ignored day and age.

Crăciun's lead article cleverly analyzes how artistic sources from Transylvania in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries demonstrate how Saxon communities in Transylvania were “primarily shaped by the mendicant [especially OFM] ethos” of the age (69). She makes her case well, but in a few places she refers to how the doctrine of “real presence” (a term central to Luther and Lutheran reforms) is evidence of OFM influence in the region: some more nuance on this point would be helpful.

Adding to Crăciun's ideas are other articles dealing with eastern Observant reform programs. Marie-Madeleine de Cevins looks primarily at sermons, but also statutes, miracle stories, and urban wills to gain a picture of lay beliefs and piety in fifteenth century Hungary. Carmen Florea puts forth three case studies that suggest that testaments and donations, along with a desire to be buried in mendicant cemeteries, insinuate an affinity of the laity for mendicant ideals as “preferred vehicles” by which “salvation could be obtained” (92) in sixteenth-century Transylvania. Gabriella Erdélyi helpfully offers a counterbalance to the other articles by emphasizing that mendicant influences alone do not sufficiently explain another “driving force for reform,” that is the “laity's growing religious conscious” (121) which challenged what they perceived to be as morally errant religious communities in sixteenth century Hungary. Rona Johnston Gordon analyzes the relationships between bishops and princes, notably Catholic leaning Austrian Habsburg's in the sixteenth century, in light of the popularity of Protestant reforms in the region. Martin Elbel's notes that OFM emphases, such as the wandering lifestyle of St. Francis and the order's connection to the Holy Land as proprietors of many of the great pilgrimage sites of Christianity, influenced pilgrimage practices throughout Bohemia.

Together these scholars suggest that scandals among secular clergy at times gave credibility to less flamboyant Observant mendicant reforms that effectively utilized dynamic preaching, pastoral care, the production of spiritual literature, admirable modeling of the godly life, and confraternities to counter Protestant ideology and practice. Mendicants encouraged by Rome provided alternative ways of thinking and acting in the east, which helped the region over time to remain, return, or move to Catholic ideals in varying degrees. All of these articles at some point briefly hint at the specter of Ottoman military advances and the changing political backdrops as complicating factors. What is missing in these discussions is the role of eastern Orthodoxy in the region, but thankfully this is picked up in the last article of the book by Greta-Monica Miron, who scrutinizes the role of Basilian monasticism and the Uniate Church in eighteenth-century Transylvania as a hybrid version of Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christianity.

A few articles in the middle of the work deal with the important topic of Jesuit influences. Elaine Fulton argues that Jesuit triumphs in Vienna during the seventeenth century were hard-won victories, which emerged out of difficult long-term Jesuit/courtier interactions and a deliberate Jesuit strategy to enlist prominent local Catholic laymen to their cause. As Fulton notes, “a pious layman could serve [the Jesuits] and their cause just as effectively as a regular cleric . . . he could even do what the order was sometimes either unwilling or unable to do for itself” (173). Christine Peters observes an ebbing and flowing Roman Catholic renewal and development of confessional identity in the face of Lutheran influences during sixteenth-century Transylvania by looking at Jesuit, Antitrinitarian, mendicant, clerical, and lay interactions. Peters and Florea talk more about the role of women than the other articles, which is a welcome focus.

The book concludes with a helpful, but unfortunately far too short, epilogue by Ronnie Po-chia Hsia. In the end, the volume makes sense of an historical world shrouded in a past of scholarly neglect. This is an admirable attempt to shine various lights onto a shady age and place, where mendicants and Jesuits often did what the secular clergy were less able to do, namely encourage a Christian lifestyle in a way that the laity eagerly embraced and emulated for the sake of their eternal souls.