English-language scholarship on sixteenth-century Hungary is disappointingly thin despite the fact that the kingdom experienced two events that forever changed its culture and history: the Reformation and the Ottoman conquest. Reformations in Hungary is a welcome remedy to this situation. It is also the overdue introduction of Pál Ács to an Anglophone audience. Ács, who is arguably the most important scholar of Hungarian literary culture in the early modern period, is the author of more than 200 essays. Here we have a collection of eighteen of his articles examining the literary dimensions of both the Reformation and the conquest. Ács begins his treatment of Reformation Hungary with three essays evaluating the impact of Desiderius Erasmus. The influence of the Dutch humanist east of the Elbe was significant. Eager Bohemian publishers produced the first vernacular translation of Praise of Folly. A Polish noble purchased Erasmus's library while Cracow elites launched a well-coordinated campaign to recruit him to the university. His reception in the Hungarian lands was equally enthusiastic. Ács argues that despite the vibrancy of religious debate and dialogue, confessional identities were slow to develop in the Hungarian lands, in part a testimony to the influence of Erasmus who rejected both Catholic and Protestant extremes. At the other end of the confessional spectrum, Ács evaluates the literary career of one of Catholic Europe's most effective reformers, the forgotten Jesuit cardinal Péter Pázmány. In a marvelous article on the island village of Ráckeve, Ács recreates the multiconfessional nature of religious life in a market town occupied by the Ottomans. Here Catholics, Orthodox, and Calvinists worshipped side by side. Ács's scholarship on Ottoman themes is yet even more intriguing. The Hungarian lands straddled the Habsburg-Ottoman divide and this unique positioning helped foster a fascinating relationship between these cultures. Here he examines figures such as Alvise Gritti, the son of the Venetian doge, who was born in Istanbul, active in Hungarian politics, and a favorite of Suleiman the Magnificent's Grand Vizier. Then there is the Catholic bishop and humanist diplomat Andreas Dudith who notoriously married a member of the Polish court. The union would have caused even greater scandal were it more widely known that his new wife's uncle had converted to Islam and now served the sultan. In sum, Reformations in Hungary is both an introduction to a scholar whose work should be better known to an Anglophone audience and an overview of those two sets of events that transformed the culture, society, and politics of early modern Hungary.
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