ABSTRACT
By the end of the sixteenth century more than three-quarters of over 5,000 parish churches across Hungary and Transylvania were being used for Protestant worship, and a majority of these Protestant parishes were held by clergy from the Reformed Church. Hungarian noble loyalty to Protestant churches was severely tested from the late sixteenth century by Counter-Reformation pressure exerted by the Catholic hierarchy and Habsburg dynasty in Royal Hungary, and by the disruption of renewed war against the Ottomans. The advance of Protestant religion in Hungary was not solely a result of political and social circumstances, but was also a consequence of the perceived attractions within Hungarian society of Calvinist and other Protestant ideas about religious renewal. The Habsburg authorities paid a back-handed compliment to the social power of Reformed catechisms during the eighteenth century. Printed literature, and especially catechisms, proved vital in brokering the popular reception of Reformed religious ideas and to the development of Hungarian Reformed identity.
