This very welcome volume presents aspects of Katalin Péter's analysis of the social history of religion in Hungary and Transylvania. The editor has included the translation of a text by Péter on the early Reformation first published in 2004 as well as five articles previously published in Hungarian between 1984 and 2005. This selection of work by Katalin Péter, one of Hungary's most distinguished early modern historians, reveals her key concern to recover the engagement of ordinary women and men with the changing religious environment of the Reformation era. Péter investigates the complex reception of ideas about reform and asks what the impact of the Reformation meant for communities in towns and the countryside. She discusses the role played by itinerant preachers, printed texts and academies and schools in spreading ideas. Péter argues that we must account for the agency of those who listened both to preachers and to passages of the Bible being read in the vernacular in shaping patterns of piety across Hungary. While noble landowners retained their rights as church patrons, Péter emphasises the lack of interest of many nobles in the style of religion practised in village communities. Péter highlights emerging themes within Hungarian religious life across the sixteenth century, arguing that new confessional cultures developed only slowly and overlapped with existing social networks. She charts the growing volume and range of printed texts in Hungary especially during the latter decades of the sixteenth century. One article highlights the development of ideas about the end times and the identification of the Ottomans as well as the papacy as manifestations of AntiChrist. A short concluding article explores fascinating evidence about religious identities in four villages on the estates of the magnate Miklós Esterházy. Ordered by Esterházy to convert to Catholicism by Easter 1639, heads of households who refused to do so were called to answer for their disobedience. Some villagers proved defiant and stated that they were unwilling to convert, others temporised and suggested that they would convert if their neighbours did so, while others said that they would convert if they could continue to receive communion in both kinds. Through this example we see something of the complex pattern of religious life as it had evolved in early modern Hungary, influenced both by the undoubted social authority of nobles as well as by varied levels of popular commitment to ideas about religious reform.
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