Between 1912 and 1914 Hungarian Jesuit historian László Velics (1852–1923) published three volumes of essays on the Jesuit past in Hungary to mark the centennial of the Society’s restoration. Velics divided the first era of Jesuit activity in Hungary into three periods, to each of which he devoted a volume. The first volume covered the Society’s initial settlement in the country, through 1610. Velics’s discussion of this period included brief histories of the religious orders in Hungary and of the first colleges established there as well as some biographies of famous Hungarian Jesuits. The second volume investigated the expansion of the Jesuits in Hungary through 1690, and the third examined the century preceding their suppression. Velics’s aim was to motivate younger Hungarian Jesuits to write monographs about the Society’s history in the country. His own work was modeled on that of Stanisław Załęski about Poland, the history of the Spanish provinces, and Bernhard Duhr’s volumes. Velics ushered in a new generation of Jesuit historians, but he was sorely lacking in modern historical skills. His literary style in particular, while illuminating, was in fact closer to that of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century annals than to that employed by early twentieth-century historians.
