Resumen de Confessional Identities and the Challenges of Modernisation: Jesuit Convicti and Reformed Colleges in the Kingdom of Hungary in the Age of Enlightenment
The Jesuit and Reformed school networks and the various boarding institutions behind them, and the changes they underwent, tell us much about 18th-19th century society of orders of the Kingdom of Hungary. In order to discuss the Enlightenment in Hungary – which was a part of the Habsburg Monarchy – it is necessary to describe the modernising measures of Habsburg Enlightened Absolutism, on the one hand, and the partly independent Hungarian cultural efforts of the Hungarian estates and nobility on the other. Both government and religious policies and interests shaped not only education, but also the various types of boarding institutions that operated alongside the educational centres. The paper aims to present a comparative analysis of two co-existing dimensions of the Hungarian educational system: the Catholic and Reformed institutional networks. First, the study presents the cultural context of Catholic and Reformed schooling and discusses the new challenges posed by the modernisation experiments of the mid-18th century. It then analyses the world of Catholic convicti and academies, as well as of Reformed colleges, adopting a comparative approach and placing the Hungarian characteristics in the context of European educational history
