The year 2008 was declared Renaissance Year in Hungary, marking, as it did, the 650th anniversary of the election of Mátyás Hunyadi as king of Hungary. His humanist courtiers named him Corvinus from the raven (Latin: corvus) in his family coat of arms. The festivities included art exhibitions, festivals of art, fashion, gastronomy and much else. The purpose seems to have been what the principal organiser, Minister of Culture István Hiller put in these words:
"Let us leave the twenty-first century behind, and immerse ourselves in the hilarities of a medieval court!" (from the Preface to the catalogue of the "Matthias the King" exhibition). There are surely good reasons to want to forget about many things in this twenty-first century, and the hilarities of the year may have offered the chance to some or even many to do so. What will certainly remain after the year will have passed are the three books published more or less in connection with it. The books to be briefly presented here differ considerably from each other.

The catalogue, an impressive quarto of 608 pages and at least as many illustrations weighs 3.5 kg; The Raven King is 264 pages in length, while Matthias Rex is a modest, small-octavo of 200 odd pages. The Raven King was written by an interested and devoted English journalist, with many personal reflections from the twenty-first century we were exhorted to leave behind. The monograph is the last completed work of a great Hungarian historian, who, alas, did not live to see it leave the press. The catalogue, in turn, is a collective effort of historians, art historians and archaeologists, most of them belonging to the younger generation of Central European scholars. Marcus Tanner became interested in Matthias when he saw examples of manuscripts from his famous library, the Bibliotheca Corviniana. András Kubinyi spent a lifetime of study on late medieval Hungary during the reigns of Matthias and his immediate successors. The round one hundred authors of the catalogue are students of the period or of some aspect of it.