These days the Reformed Church in the Hungarian lands is keen to stress its Calvinist heritage, and the present volume, with its twenty-four authors and its many fine and telling illustrations, some in colour, amounts to a celebration as well as a reassessment on the occasion of the quincentenary of the theologian's birth. It was not always so: earlier the ‘C’ word often remained unspoken, even disregarded, as is here shown. Jan-Andrea Bernhard confirms how little direct influence Calvin exerted in Hungary before the 1550s: he showed scant concern for the spread there of the Reformation, the main foreign agents of which were Melanchthon and Bullinger. Tamás Juhász points to the role of the Heidelberg confession and catechism, rather than of Calvinism as such. Márta Fata and Máté Millisits confirm this in terms of lieux de mémoire: Calvin himself became significant only at the time of the 1909 anniversary (when Hungarians became prominent at Geneva too).

On two big questions the volume surveys rather than innovates. András Szabó provides a brief introduction to the ethnic issue, but offers no new insight into why many Magyars in the kingdom of Hungary became Calvinists, whereas other nationalities did not. Eva Kowalská, from a Slovak perspective, likewise has no explanation for the original split, but thinks that towns may have been more cautious (and there were more of them in Upper Hungary, where Slovaks clung to Luther), whereas Calvinism had greater scope in other, especially Turkish, areas. She stresses continuing Lutheran–Calvinist tensions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while Fata furnishes further evidence about relations with Lutherans – mainly tense, though sometimes co-operative – in her microstudy of the exceptional phenomenon of a clutch of German Calvinist villages in south-west Hungary. In another interesting microstudy Sándor Elõd Õsz demonstrates more and longer Calvinist influence on Rumanians in parts of western Transylvania than was previously thought: a serious mission there lasted well into the eighteenth century in places, alongside gradual assimilation to the Magyars or to the Greek-Catholics. Hans-Christian Maner examines later historiographical debate on this influence, from the Rumanian side: Greek-Catholic writers perceived an oppression from which only the Union could save them; Orthodox ones saw some fruits in strengthening the national cause; all treated Calvinism among the Rumanians as a political issue only.

The second crux is how far the Reformed faith served as a vehicle for political resistance among the Magyars. András Péter Szabó offers a thorough and judicious survey of the earlier period, when religious grievances were added to those of the estates, and the arch-rebel Bocskai was viewed as a Gideon-like liberator rather than a magisterial one. István Szijártó shows that eighteenth-century Calvinists inclined to loyalty; their role in oppositional politics was only proportionate (and plenty of Catholics could be alienated too). In fact the Reformed Church constituted a kind of counter-establishment, sustained above all by its higher educational standards. János L. Gyõri sounds a bit triumphalist, but he is fair to claim a unique role for Debrecen as Hungary's most continuous Calvinist college, and the one with the widest impact, given its broad student catchment and its socio-economic autonomy: of a total of some 20,000 students there by 1850, about two-thirds became ministers. Gábor Sipos gives a standard account of the high period of Nagyenyed, the equivalent college in Transylvania (mainly, but not solely, for Magyars), till it was devastated by war in 1849 and demotion after 1867. Réka Bozzay provides useful statistics, but a predictable text, on the role of Hungarian students who studied at Leiden, the external academy of choice for Calvinists. Noémi Viskolcz sketches in the network of contacts, as diplomat, scholar and theologian, of Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld, one of the eminent foreign Calvinists in seventeenth-century Transylvania.

These issues retained their force into the nineteenth century, where much less attention has been paid to them by historians. Ethnic factors accompanied attempts at Protestant union. Botond Kertész – in the pick of the chapters – analyses the forces for union, powerful at times, even able to forge some institutional links; but always vulnerable to divisions within as well as between denominations, especially among the clergy. Eleonóra Erzsébet Géra shows how caritative work among the needy in Budapest brought Calvinists and Lutherans together, but divided each of them between liberals and evangelicals; and tension was aggravated by attempts to sustain the originally German(-language) character of the initiatives. In high politics the Reformed were mostly disinclined to rock the boat. Péter Zakar finds that some Calvinist preachers saw Lajos Kossuth (himself a Lutheran) as Moses; but it is unclear how widespread or distinctive their identification was. For the dualist decades László Tõkéczki uses premier István Tisza's own comments to show him (rather indulgently?) as a principled Christian liberal, asserting a direct link to Calvin's own ideals and those of the seventeenth-century Transylvanian princes; whereas Juliane Brandt's chapter, the longest, delivers disappointingly little. She takes the familiar evidence that the counties with the most Calvinist inhabitants were also the most separatist, but fails to clarify how much religion had to do with that, especially since better-educated Calvinists tended to back the party of government.

The Hungarian lands were and remain an important component of Europe's Reformiertentum; more so than might appear from the introductory essay here, in which Heinz Schilling helpfully presents the main features of Calvinism, stressing the formative experience for it of exile and migration, and its tight institutional and moral organisation as a consequence – but with hardly a mention of the country under consideration. How typical Hungary has been in that connection remains open, since this collection lacks comparative approaches. But one abiding impression which it leaves is of much conservatism and localism, earlier and now. Even today Hungary's Reformed Church looks stronger in its parts than in the whole. What was probably the most elaborate commemoration of 2009, a lavish exhibition held in Budapest (its beautiful catalogue is published as Kálvin hagyománya: Református kulturális örökég a Duna mentén, ed. Péter Farbaky and Réka Kiss), a pendant to this volume, actually deals with only one of the country's five ecclesiastical districts.