Religious Persecution, Exile and the Making of Long Reformation (1500−1800) in Royal Hungary

This paper intends to focus on the Calvinist and Lutheran refugees of Royal Hungary in order to introduce the major types of exile cases and to evaluate their particular significance in the relevant historical and intellectual contexts of the late seventeenth century. It will argue that the emergence of a reformed confessional identity may well have been influenced by exile experiences, yet the Hungarian case displayed some special features, such as the close interrelatedness of martyrological discourses with patterns of early modern proto-nationalism. It will conclude establishing that the delayed character of both persecution and the emergence of a protestant martyrology demand a rather different perception of Reformation too. Taking into account the historical facts that it was only the Edict of Tolerance (1782) and its validation (1791) that terminated religious persecution and granted free practice of religions, the concept of long Reformation appears to be the most fitting application to the Hungarian case.