Dénesi Tamás (szerk.): Collectanea Sancti Martini - A Pannonhalmi Főapátság Gyűjteményeinek Értesítője 5. (Pannonhalma, 2017)
II. Közlemények
120 Szovák Kornél Kornél Szovák A New Source Related to the Religious Reform of Máté Tolnai at the End of the Middle Ages At the end of the Middle Ages, the religious orders in Hungary used every effort to stop the general decline of observance. The leaders of the orders resorted to every applicable means in order to confirm the sense of vocation and religious self-cons-ciousness in the members of their orders, and they took measures one after another, which were aimed at institutional reforms. The efforts varied among the different religious orders, out of which the Benedictine reform-model is the best known in details owing to the sources preserved without loss in the Archives of the Archabbey of Pannonhalma. The foundations to recreate the historic scheme were laid by the authors – Pongrác Sörös, Tamás Füssy and others – of the rightly illustrious History of the Order , they reconstructed the chronology of the process, and they published in print the related documents. By working out the theoretical model, Elemér Mályusz located the Benedictine reform in the context of efforts of the other religious or-ders, and he highlighted its place in the overall network. It became clarified in the course of the history of scholarship that in the early modern period the late mediaeval reforms provided the unambiguous starting point for the sake of reawakening the idea of religious life. The scope of sources scarcely increased in the past decades, and it cannot greatly be expected in the future, either. However, recently scholars’ attention has turned to formularies, which are of great quantity with significant difficulties of research and interpretation. Regularly, these manuscripts preserved documents of official character deprived of their historical data, and they general-ly give a glance at the operation of a judicial institution. Concerning ecclesiastical jurisdiction conducted in seats of prelates, two important manuscripts have been handed down to our days: the Beneéthy Codex kept in Gyulafehérvár and the Nyási Formulary in Esztergom, and the two are in a genetic relationship with each other at the same time, the latter one being a copy of the former one. The Beneéthy Collection – in the wake of the discovery of Ignác Batthyány, the learned Transylvanian bishop of the 18 th century – provided source-data even at the time of the great generation of the historians of the Order about the historic circumstances of the Benedictine reforms measures, the knowledge of the Nyási-manuscript has become a part of general scholarly consciousness only recently by way of György Bónis ’s abstracts in Hungarian. Because the copy includes complements as well, which differ from the model codex, these parts reveal some documents, which in small details complete and improve our knowledge of the everyday aspects of Benedictine reform. At about the 1900’s, the challenge of a question still seemed to be insoluble: in 1512, under what circumstances the Monastery of Zalavár – an abbey of royal foundation whose history can be traced back to King Saint Stephen – joined the union of reformed mon-asteries, and then later why it abandoned this course. The document published in the appendix of the present paper highlights that the new abbot originally was a monk of the monastery on Pannonhalma, and that he was also in the confidence of the reform
