In 1517 the archbishop of Esztergom, Cardinal Bakócz, expelled the lazy and womanising Augustinian friars from their convent in the small western Hungarian town of Körmend to replace them with observant Franciscans. When the Augustinian order appealed Pope Leo x ordered an investigation. The resulting documents form the basis of Gabriella Erdélyi's A cloister on trial.Footnote ¹ While the late medieval judges wanted to establish the legitimacy of the expulsion, Erdélyi set out to follow into the footsteps of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,Footnote ² for she was ‘interested in concentrating on the randomly dispersed clues within the fabric of the witness testimonies, in the nature of the relationship laypeople maintained with the friars, and their attitudes and actions with regard to the cloister’ to gain ‘insight into the social and religious milieu of a late medieval small community’ (p.5).

First, Erdélyi concentrates her attention on the papal investigation (1518), and refutes the claim that it was an unfair trial, albeit conducted under the overwhelming authority of Tamás Bakócz, the leading prelate-politician of his age. Although the fact that Leo x ordered an investigation into the conflict in Körmend reflected the declining influence of the Hungarian cardinal, the case was entrusted to his protegé, the bishop of Pécs, and the pope subsequently accepted its results, namely that the expulsion of the Augustinians from Körmend was lawful. Still, the investigation was not biased by any political agenda; rather, events reflect the dominance of local factors, stresses Erdélyi, which opens the door to an in-depth investigation on the micro-level. In this respect, the book takes a path different from that of Peter Linehan in his The ladies of Zamora.Footnote ³ He moves from the case of the nuns in Zamora to questions of high church politics in Rome, this second strand of the story being even more important than local events in Spain. Gabriella Erdélyi, however, claims the precedence of local factors and the autonomy of microinvestigations.

In part ii of the book, the minutes of the investigation are explored, especially witness testimonies. We learn that forty-nine witnesses were heard, the judge was consequent in asking his questions and the scribe did not edit the texts when translating the Hungarian statements into Latin. The witnesses were selected according to the customs of the period, when age, social prestige and wealth served as the criteria of trustworthiness. The landlord of Körmend, Bakócz's nephew, who had to defend the expulsion of the Augustinians, mainly invited witnesses from Körmend and its neighbourhood who were not legally dependent upon him.

Erdélyi focusses on the seventy-five stories told by the witnesses, taking all these narratives as manifestations of common knowledge. Forty of them retold individual events, and the four most popular stories were repeated no less than thirty-five times: that cloister buildings were renovated by the townspeople; that a friar left a woman pregnant; that one of the friars was beaten up because he was visiting suspicious places at night; and finally that Friar Mihály was caught by the castellan in the cloister with his lover. It is interesting that those who had spent a lot of time in the friars’ company told less stories about them than those who had served only as their occasional companions. Even fewer stories were narrated by the last group of the witnesses, those simply visiting the cloister church and outsiders. Some of the friars' former companions may have regretted consorting with them, and they provided richer testimonies; others of them chose silence. This is especially true for the Augustinians’ five clerical drinking fellows. Evidently, they tried to conceal their own misdeeds along with those of the Augustinians. As for the rest, the author claims that the witnesses did not only want to confirm the judge's expectations, but they themselves saw the Augustinians’ behaviour in a more negative light than previously. Being already used to the Franciscan monks' activities, they spoke as if they had expected the same conduct from the Augustinians as well.

In part iii of the book, the emerging picture of the cloister's crisis and its social background are investigated. The author draws a parallel between the cloister's reformation and Reformation, focussing on the question of the priests’ election. For townspeople in Körmend, sexual misconduct represented the main conversation topic about the Augustinian friars, but this element does not take the central place in Erdélyi's book, unlike Judith Brown's Immodest acts, where lesbian love is forced into the foreground in a case that is basically about faked sainthood. Erdélyi does not concentrate on the verification of the charges levelled against the monks either for she is principally interested in the daily encounters and conflict between them and the inhabitants of Körmend. The problem of the latter with the friars was not that they broke celibacy, for that was common among Hungarian lower clergy during this period, but that this did not take the stable form of marriage or concubinage: poor, mobile and rootless mendicant Augustinians could not afford an ordered family life. Their sexual relationships violated, therefore, the norms that were also valid for laypeople. They were generally dangerous for the peace of the community, especially because being exempt from lay jurisdiction, they could evade responsibility for their acts.

The presence of Augustinian monks in Körmend offered certain significant opportunities to the townspeople – but these were, then, thwarted by their conduct. This explains the people's ambivalence toward the friars: the ‘vacillation between conflict and solidarity’ (p.124). There was a huge demand for a range of religious services in Körmend, with its population of 600 or 700 inhabitants, and the presence there of a dozen monks in addition to the town's eight priests and many clerical students was clearly an asset. This is explained by Erdélyi with reference to Robert Scribner's concept of ‘the economy of the sacred’ that imagines the relationship with God in reciprocal, quasi-contractual terms.Footnote ⁴ Laypeople wanted to do everything they could to ensure their own salvation and that of their beloved. The presence of a convent in town did not only mean the celebration of more holy masses, the hearing of more confessions, but also gave locals the chance to do good works. (The medieval practice of the consumption of the sacred was rejected by the Martin Luther, himself a former Augustinian.Footnote ⁵) The Augustinians’ negligence rendered these chances negligible; masses, if celebrated at all, were celebrated with the celebrant drunk, and hardly anyone could donate alms to the friars with a good heart. For this reason, while the townspeople of Körmend accepted the services the friars offered, they also voiced their anger against them, and the local lord acted upon this. When, however, the pope confirmed the expulsion of the Augustinians, the landlord lost interest and did not pay for the renovation of the cloister. The Franciscans soon left, and Körmend remained without friars.

Evoking also David Warren Sabean's classic essay Gabriella Erdélyi suggests a new understanding of confession and community.Footnote ⁶ She claims that lay and clerical interpretations of the sacraments differed significantly. According to popular understanding unworthy mediators, like drunken Augustinians, were dangerous. In their hands the sacraments brought harm and not help. In her conclusion, Erdélyi interprets her research according to the discourse on sixteenth-century church history that stresses the continuity between the periods before and after 1517, the similarities between Franciscan observance and the Reformation. Both monastic reform and the later abolition of the monasteries can be interpreted as a sign of growing lay influence. (In a certain sense, Peter Blickle's communalism paradigm is being tested here.Footnote ⁷) Finally, Erdélyi points to the election of rural clergy by local lay communities as the crucial link in the chain that connects events in Körmend, in which the local community and the landlord brought about religious change, to the Reformation.

The publication in English of A cloister on trial at a time when the quincentenary of the Reformation is being celebrated brings one of the best examples of Hungarian microhistory within easy reach of the interested general reader in Europe and beyond.