Due to high adult mortality and the custom of remarriage, stepfamilies were a common phenomenon in pre-industrial Europe. Focusing on East Central Europe, a neglected area of western historiography, this book draws essential comparisons in terms of remarriage patterns and stepfamily life with Northwestern Europe. Why were women in the 'east' more ready to remarry? What were the responsibilities of a stepfather or a stepmother? By drawing on quantitative as well as qualitative approaches, the book offers an historical demographical narrative of the frequency of stepfamilies in a comparative framework, and also assesses the impact of stepparents on the mortality and career prospects of their stepchildren. The ethnic and religious diversity of East Central Europe also allows for distinctions and comparisons to be made within the region. Remarriage and Stepfamilies in East Central Europe, 1600-1900 will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in the history of family, marriage, and society in East Central Europe.

In 1517, the usually tranquil friary in the Hungarian town of Koermend found itself at the centre of controversy when its Augustinian friars, charged with drunkenness, sexual abuses and liturgical negligence, were driven out and replaced with observant Franciscans. The agent of change in this conflict, cardinal Thomas Bakocz, claimed to be acting in the name of 'cloister reform' motivated by a religious agenda, while the Augustinians portrayed themselves as the victims of a political game. Based on the surviving interrogations of a papal enquiry into these events, this book illuminates the tensions and potential conflict that lurked within the religious culture of a seemingly unremarkable and remote town. The story of the friary trial of Koermend provides a fascinating window into religion and society of Europe at the dawn of the Reformation, investigating the processes by which ordinary people emerge as historical agents from the written records. By focussing on their experiences as represented in the trial documents the book reveals the spaces and borders of individual and communal action within the dynamic of lay-clerical relations negotiated in a friary reform at the beginning of the 16th century. Furthermore, the moral nature of the accusations levelled at the Augustinians - and whether these were justified or instigated for political reasons - offers further insights into the nature of late-medieval Catholicism and the claims of Protestant reformers.

In 1517, the usually tranquil friary in the Hungarian town of Koermend found itself at the centre of controversy when its Augustinian friars, charged with drunkenness, sexual abuses and liturgical negligence, were driven out and replaced with observant Franciscans. The agent of change in this conflict, cardinal Thomas Bakocz, claimed to be acting in the name of 'cloister reform' motivated by a religious agenda, while the Augustinians portrayed themselves as the victims of a political game. Based on the surviving interrogations of a papal enquiry into these events, this book illuminates the tensions and potential conflict that lurked within the religious culture of a seemingly unremarkable and remote town. The story of the friary trial of Koermend provides a fascinating window into religion and society of Europe at the dawn of the Reformation, investigating the processes by which ordinary people emerge as historical agents from the written records. By focussing on their experiences as represented in the trial documents the book reveals the spaces and borders of individual and communal action within the dynamic of lay-clerical relations negotiated in a friary reform at the beginning of the 16th century. Furthermore, the moral nature of the accusations levelled at the Augustinians - and whether these were justified or instigated for political reasons - offers further insights into the nature of late-medieval Catholicism and the claims of Protestant reformers.

Katalin Peter offers is a vigorous and stimulating reassessment of the history of the Protestant Reformation in Hungary. The Reformation has traditionally been explained in terms of theology, the corruption of the church, and the roles of princes. Katalin Peter shifts the context of study of the Reformation in Hungary to a bottom-up examination of the social dynamics of religious change, producing a lively narrative of the experiences and reactions of contemporary actors -- including rural town and village communities, local priests and landlords -- to evangelical ideas. Through a close reading of church visitation records, common men and women emerge on the pages of the book both as the agents of religious change and as the defenders of the old faith, while local priests, as Peter, had to adapt to lay demands. A comparative analysis of the position and actions of landlords as church patrons in all three parts of contemporary Hungary -- the kingdom under Habsburg rule, the Ottoman-vassal Principality of Transylvania, and Ottoman Hungary -- leads to the conclusion that patrons did not interfere in local religious change, since this change did not interfere with the distribution of power. In addition to this radically new narrative of the social dynamics of the early Reformation in Hungary, Peter engages in the long-standing debates concerning the roles of the Protestant Reformation in intellectual culture, and she illuminates the scopes and limits of the confessional cultures that emerged in its wake. The book brings together a coherent body of work that began to be published in the 1990s and until now has only been available in Hungarian.

The edited volume aims to re-contextualize revolts in early modern Central and Southern Europe (Hungary, Croatia, Czech Lands, Austria, Germany, Italy) by adopting the interdisciplinary and comparative methods of social and cultural history. Instead of structural explanations like the model of state-building versus popular resistance, it wishes to put back the peasants themselves to the historical narratives of revolts. Peasants appear in the book as active agents fighting or bargaining for freedom, which was a practical issue for them. Nonetheless, the language of lord-peasant negotiation was that of religion, just as official punishments used Christian symbols. The approach of revolts as the events of collective violence also highlights the experiences and memories of participants. How did individuals and groups use remembering and forgetting as a means of forging an identity for themselves? Instead of the narratives of the powerful that became the normative stories of history, the perspective of the rebels uncovers the everyday faces of revolts more forcibly. Finally, contributors examine how later narrators used the rebels for their own purposes, in other words the subsequent representation of the revolts and their leaders in image, literature and historiography comes to the fore. The volume aims to overcome disciplinary boundaries by bringing together historians and scholars of related disciplines including the history of literature, the visual arts and anthropology. The central contention of the volume - the cultural imprint of peasant revolts - is fully addressed, thereby filling a conspicuous gap in the currently available literature.