Calvin und Reformiertentum in Ungarn und Siebenburgen: Helvetische Bekenntnis, Ethnie, Politik vom 16. Jahrhundert bis 1918, ed. Marta Fata and Anton Schindling

Abstract

The history of Calvinism is still often written as the history of an essentially West and Central European religious movement that both developed an extraordinary revolutionary potential and made a significant contribution to the emergence of capitalism. The existence of significant Calvinist churches in Eastern and East Central Europe, in the Poland-Lithuanian kingdom and in Transylvania and Hungary, is rather neglected and, if acknowledged at all, treated merely as another less important dimension of this quintessentially international confession. This important new volume, edited by Márta Fata and Anton Schindling, redresses the balance with a series of illuminating essays on the genesis, nature and tradition of Hungarian Calvinism—or the Hungarian reformed churches, as they prefer to style themselves—from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. Originating in a Tübingen conference held in 2008 in anticipation of the quincentenary of Calvin's birth, the volume aims to give a new impetus to the study of the Hungarian reformed tradition by applying to its study the innovative methods and the new research agendas developed by historians of the equivalent western traditions.