In the eighteenth century, Slovenian ecclesiastical and other religious hymns began to appear in large numbers in both printed and manuscript texts. At that time, the creation and rendering of new hymns was encouraged by numerous monastic orders active in Eastern Styria, especially by the Jesuits, who settled in Maribor in the mid-eighteenth century and established a grammar school (gimnazija) there. The initiative for Foglar’s manuscript, which is compiled by eight different scribes, can be linked to the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the Divine Pilgrimage to Mariazell, celebrated in 1757. The hymn book is of great importance as it is the first record of Mariazell’s hymns in Slovenian. In addition to 13 poems of St Mary, it also contains a festive hymn dedicated to the Holy Trinity; a hymn of St Ignatius of Loyola celebrating the love of God; a hymn worshipping Jesus’ name; eschatological hymns about faithful souls in Purgatory and the purpose and end of man; a hymn of repentance for the fasting period about a lost sheep; and hymns dedicated to St Notburga, St Magdalene, St Ursula and St Joseph.

Linguistic analysis has revealed that Styrian writers were significantly influenced by the Carniolan editions of the past, which were linguistically adapted to their local needs. Thus, the hymns are a mixture of Central and East Slovenian literary norms, e.g., the spelling of the permanently long schwa as the graph a and e (dan/den), the adoption of a monophthong or a diphthong for the permanently long jat (svet/svejt), respectively, as well as for the permanently long o (moč/movč). In addition, we find some typical regional peculiarities that place the hymnbook in the East Styrian dialect area, e.g., the vocalization causing the final participial -ł to become -a and the vowel-like ł̥ to change to u.

This literary analysis focuses on genre and content analysis, as well as verse analysis. The hymns contain motifs and poetic metaphors from the Bible and medieval hymns, as well as from the Slovenian Protestant tradition. The hymns also reflect the fact that, at the time, the Habsburg Monarchy was at war with Prussia. The analysis of the verse has shown that the origins of the Slovenian syllabotonic verse date as far back as the eighteenth century, especially in poems translated from German or Latin, those written by educated priests, or those transcribed from one of the base texts. In the hymns that were rendered from oral sources, the form and foot of the stanza could not be identified. The research has revealed some well-known stanzaic forms, such as the Hildebrand stanza, the pilgrim stanza, the Vagant stanza, as well as Alpine dancing songs and the so-called Chevy-Chase-Strophe.