The Term, Development, Purpose, and Practice of Church or Canonical Visitation: Unitarians in Háromszék in the Seventeenth Century Between Conventional Rhetoric and Reality

In the initial segment of this chapter, I will provide an overview of the visitation framework employed by both the Catholic Church and Protestant denominations with an analysis of the visitation practices within the Hungarian Lutheran and Reformed Churches. In the second part of the chapter, attention is directed toward the visitation system within the Unitarian Church of Transylvania. I try to break down the conventional rhetoric that took shape around the topic of the forced conversion of the Unitarian congregations in the seventeenth century in the seat of Háromszék where the Unitarians and Calvinists were living together in a distinctive symbiosis. The congregations there were allowed to freely elect their ministers and teachers. It was not unusual that a congregation had a Unitarian minister and a Calvinist teacher or vice versa. The elimination of this integrated Protestant institution and the denominational segregation arose in 1619 during the visit of the Calvinist Bishop János Keserűi Dajka. The Unitarian Church historiography held for centuries that 60–72 Unitarian congregations were converted to Calvinism then. Analyzing the minutes of the investigations ordered by Princess Catherine of Brandenburg in 1630, I will show that only 14 congregations had a Unitarian past. Thus, we must reconsider the conventional rhetoric that the notorious Calvinist Bishop János Keserűi Dajka converted the Unitarians of Háromszék to Calvinism.