ABSTRACT
The Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania was the product of a late and incomplete sixteenth-century reformation. By the early seventeenth century the building blocks of a Reformed confession for the Hungarian Church were however largely in place, with consistent adherence to the Helvetic confession and Heidelberg catechism. The Bible, Psalter and other key texts were available in the vernacular, and a settled, if regionally variable, administrative structure was established with Reformed Church regions and districts under the control of superintendents, archdeacons, synods and all-clergy area presbyteries. Indeed, hierarchical controls over Reformed communities in Hungary and Transylvania were strengthened during this period, with canons and state laws aiming to defend church doctrine and order. From the accession of Gabor Bethlen in 1613 a series of Reformed Transylvanian princes offered their co-religionists protection against local confessional rivals, ennobling the clergy as a class, and supporting the development of Reformed educational centres across the region. The Reformed Church achieved the status of orthodoxy in the early seventeenth century Transylvanian state, as the public church which informed the ideology of the area from the Szekler lands in eastern Transylvania to the counties of north-eastern and eastern Hungary.1
