Origin and Career of Piarist Religious Priests in the 18th Century Kingdom of Hungary A Case Study

Abstract

In recent years a research trend has been developing at the border of educational, ecclesiastical, and social history, which tries to identify regional and structural patterns of intellectual careers in the schools and scientific institutions of the early modern and modern Kingdom of Hungary. This study would like to join the first results of this, which refer predominantly to 19–20th-century Protestant environments (e.g. Kovács, 2018; Ugrai, 2023), with an investigation of a segment of the 18th-century Catholic school network, the Piarist Order’s Hungarian province. The study is rooted in a database containing the biographical data of religious priest-teachers (70 persons) who served in the noble college Collegium Theresianum in Vác (est. 1767–1784). In the first part, it tries to shed light on the characteristics of the social and cultural background of this group as representatives of the members of the Order. In the second part, it presents shortly the background and the career stages of six selected individuals, illustrating the results of the first part on the one hand, and formulating some lessons regarding Piarists’ careers on the other. The two most important recruitment bases for the Order formed the citizens of certain Catholic towns of the former Ottoman territories, also Piarist “school towns” (Pest, Vác, Szeged), and the population of the Catholic-majority north-west Hungarian region, which represented a wider spectrum in terms of social status and place of residence. Looking at the language skills of those entering the order, the basic multilingualism of the Hungarian Piarists of the time can be seen, as well as the fact that members of the order who spoke German well were probably preferred in the noble college.