Conclusions

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The Calvinist reformation was not a western European event, nor was the community it produced overwhelmingly a western European one. The Reformed congregations of Hungary and Transylvania formed by far the largest Calvinist church in central Europe, and constituted a fundamental component of the international Calvinist world. Whilst Reformed clergy remained conscious of Hungarian political and social conditions, princes, nobles, and ordinary parishioners were increasingly expected not only to show personal commitment to strictly ordered doctrine and worship, but also to meet demanding standards of individual piety and morality. The invigoration of vernacular Hungarian culture and religious distinctiveness found in Calvinism increased awareness of supposed ethnic uniqueness and raised the possibility of a non-Habsburg, Hungarian identity of relevance not only to the nobility. Despite later partisan impressions of the role of the Reformed church within Hungarian society, some sort of patriotism sprang from the relationship between ethnicity, language, and Protestantism in post-reformation Hungary, a patriotism from which Hungarian nationalism was later to emerge.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: