The Exorcist of Sombor. The Mentality of an Eighteenth-Century Franciscan Friar. By Dániel Bárth.

Abstract

Dániel Bárth’s book, as indicated by the title, is written for scholars of the history of religion, of the history of mentalities, as well as for those who study popular belief. His choice of subject, the life story of the Southern Slavic Franciscan friar, Rochus Szmendrovich, who became famous and got in trouble for his exorcisms, invokes the quintessential monograph of a recently influential historical trend, ‘microhis-tory’, a classic written by Giovanni Levi and published in English under the title Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist . 1 Microhistory, the historian’s version of Clifford Geertz’s “thick description”, can only be explored where there is an exceptional source—which is how Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie was able to write, based on records from the Inquisition, the story of the early-fourteenth-century Pyrenean village, Montaillou, where Cathar prefects were hiding; or how Carlo Ginzburg wrote about the strange and original worldviews of the Italian miller, Menocchio, convicted as a heretic at the end of the sixteenth century. Bárth discovered a gem of this type fifteen years ago in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Kalocsa when he found a set of documents containing the letters of the eighteenth-century Franciscan exor-cist and the decisions of the ecclesiastical investigation about him. In his introduction, he gives a vivid description of the ‘big catch’