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National Research, Development and Innovation Office Nr. K-145896
2024-2027
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Summary of the research and its aims:
Values and endeavours of indisputable significance of the cultural and public history are associated with the Protestants. They were compelled to a minority existance so in a political as in a legal sense for the most part throughout their existence, and no uniform church governance system had developed in line with the historical twists of the Hungarian Kingdom (16-19th century). This is not only difficult to be fited in any of the current church organisational models abroad, but also various centres of gravity apply to each region within Hungary. Research will be performed on the territory of the Transylvanian, Transtibiscan and Cistibiscan Reformed church districts, where the Canons of Geleji (1649) retained their validity until the historical threshold in 1848–1849. Effective examination and sensitive presentation of the significance of the geographic division can be performed in spite of the relatively short geographic distances. Here we mean the Reformed large-regions (Transylvanian, Transtibiscan and Cistibiscan communities) within which further smaller units (cultural regions) stemming from a certain close cultural togetherness can be separated from each other. It is almost certain that there are areas with specific characteristics in the “buffer zones” at the boundaries between two Reformed large-regions in each church district (e.g. the Szatmár, Szabolcs or Szilágyság) or inclusions that developed in specific situations (e.g. Háromszék in Transylvania).Consequently, the utmost importance will be attached to the dynamic change in geographic scale and to the transition between micro-, mezo- and macro-level assessments in the course of the research.
The Reformed church and cultural history needs a new, comparative approach. Over time, this mightestablishthe synthesis of the Carpathian basin church history that will meet the requirements of the 21st century, transcend the fraction lines caused by the borders of regions and church districts, handle territorial features in place, have a uniform structure, be based on interdisciplinary foundations.
To achieve this goal the investigation will be performed in three steps:
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Ecclesiastical history as a source of information on everyday life in the congregations of the Reformed Church’s Békés Diocese between 1711 and 1821
National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NRDIO) No. FK-123974
2017-2022
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In the 18th century the Reformed Church’s Békés Diocese stretched from the valley of the Körös rivers to border region in the south of Hungary, covering a very big geographical area. Presently the former congregations are located in three countries and five dioceses. From the end of Rákóczi’s War of Independence up until the administrative reform of the Transtibiscan church district the Békés Diocese was unified in terms of its territory: there were no congregations quitting the diocese, what is more, new ones joined. This is rather lucky from a historical research perspective because this era can be considered a homogeneous period. In the research project our objective is to learn about the everyday life of people living in the Reformed Church’s Békés Diocese in the 18th century. We intend to collect information from various archives and to publish them in print and electronic form. From the project’s perspective we differentiate three groups of documents: documents related to religious life belong to the first group. Some of the topics that fall into this category are the following: religious life, holidays, church disciplinary matters, religious worldview, religious values, religious tolerance, conflicts between denominations. We put the external and internal relations of the congregation into the second group and the third group is for educational and cultural issues. When studying the system of relationships we examine the relationship between pastor and congregation members, settlements’ contacts with the church, conflicts between the parish and the diocese, and the communication between lay authorities and the church. Since in the Békés diocese there were German-speaking communities as well, it is worth shedding light on the connection with foreign churches, too. As for learning about educational and cultural matters, we examine how various intellectual trends were received, how prosperous peasants participated in the literary life and what kind of set of values they stood for (e.g. the public opinion about reading or pox vaccination, etc.). In the course of studying the fields mentioned above we plan to analyze documents in each congregational archive of the Békés diocese, where probably presbyterial minutes and correspondence will be the most useful sources.
