The study presents the composition of the body of Roman Catholic diocesan bishops based on royal appointments between 1686 and 1799. The main angles of the research are social status, education, monastic affiliation, geographical origin, transfers and accumulating benefices, and appointment to cardinalship. The study seeks to resolve the contradiction between two prevalent statements in historical scholarship, which upholds both that the ecclesiastic estate was traditionally an important sphere for social mobility, and that the episcopal body in eighteenth-century Hungary was a closed circle, with a membership based on status and political reliability.

In this study I attempt to present some characteristics of late confessionalisation in the Kingdom of Hungary on the basis of various examples, which allow us an insight to the tumultuous local manifestations of the Catholic–Protestant relationship. The term “late confessionalisation”, created in the German-speaking scholarship, can be well applied for the Hungarian circumstances – obviously, taking the local specificities into account. The study on the one hand attempts to define the time frames of late confessionalisation in Hungary; on the other to show how the intention of the central power to create a new system of norms overwrote the interests of local landholders. For the Protestants in most territories of the country it meant only to allow the so-called private exercise of faith, which on the one hand drastically limited the freedom of consciousness of the people involved, but in contrast to other countries of the Habsburgs it made possible for the Protestant communities to legally preserve their confessional identities.