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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is the presentation of a regal gesture and the answer given in response from the side of the estates. Maria Theresia formally invited the Hungarian aristocrats and noblemen to her coronation as rex foemina in Prague in 1743, and this invitation was accepted by many representatives of the estates. This gesture is not unknown to Czech and Hungarian historians, but its symbolical meaning has not been fully appreciated. It is not discussed in Hungarian syntheses of the period and the international research ignores this topic. But the regal invitation to the coronation and its acceptance by the estates are acts that are important in a different way than the crowning ceremony and the events of the festivities. The reciprocal symbolical gestures can be interpreted as parts of the political communication between Maria Theresia and the Estates of the Kingdom of Hungary. The paper explores, first of all, the military, political and ceremonial circumstances of the coronation itself, and shows in which way the ceremony was adjusted to the intention of crowning Maria Theresia as a King. Then it analyses the invitation as a symbolical gesture, and the circle of the invited guests. After that, it explores the travel diaries of Hungarian brothers György and László Radvánszky, which makes it possible to explore their reactions to the coronation. Finally, this event is interpreted as a part of the Habsburg-Hungarian relations and as an element of the new government strategy of Maria Theresa, who sought to win over Hungarian noblemen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role that philosophers and government advisors of the Enlightenment era attributed to convenient education and training in the process of social advancement needs not be emphasised. The same realisation on the part of the Habsburg political elite in the second half of the 18th century led to the emergence of a state-run educational policy. The present paper focusses on one special set of problems, namely the (intentional) transformation of the mentality of the nobility, more precisely the Hungarian nobility. Its aim is the survey of a cultural process that led from a change in the cultural ideal of the court through the gradual expansion of noble schooling to the political commitment of the privileged estate to public good and reforms. The change in noble claims to culture is briefly presented in a broader European context, special attention being paid, with regard to the knight's academies (Ritterakademie), to the conception elaborated by the Prussian minister, baron Karl Abraham von Zedlitz, about the connection between noble education and patriotism. Consequently, the views of imperial advisors and theorists on noble education are explored. For the Viennese government circles the dismissive attitude of the Hungarian nobility to sharing public financial burdens in general had long posed a serious problem. In the 1760s the state council (Staatsrat) identified a possible solution in the purposeful training of Hungarian noble youth: it aimed to provide the future decision-making group with an education in state sciences and patriotic sentiments. In this respect, the advisors, especially baron Egyd von Borié, intended a crucial role to be played by Joseph von Sonnenfels and the Theresianum in Vienna. Sonnenfels emerged as the key figure in the education of state sciences in the Habsburg Monarchy, and his works, which proclaimed commitment to the state, were mandatory readings at the universities and academies of the Monarchy until the mid-19th century. The ideas of the state sciences and Sonnenfels' also prevailed in the Theresianum, and this noble academy of the imperial capital accordingly played an important role in the education of the Hungarian nobility, thanks to the great number of its stipends. In the last section of the paper the later political career of the first aristocratic generation trained to the service of public good is examined, through the case of count Károly Zichy, with an emphasis on the cultural and ideological connection between the reform generations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]