Prayers Reused

Abstract The Research Group on Baroque Literature and Spirituality, which has been active since 2012, among other researches aims to study the history of prayers in Hungary before 1800. This includes the systematisation and database recording of individual prayers found in prayer books and other types of printed matter and manuscripts. This paper presents this work, outlines the difficulties arising from the methodology, and gives examples of possible uses of the database, for example to demonstrate the phenomenon that we typically have no verifiable data on the authorship of prayers in prayer books, but that the database can be used to show that editors of newly published prayer books prefer to use texts from earlier publications – in the era of religious controversies – regardless of denomination.