Abstract

Transylvania differed in many ways from the rest of the Habsburg Empire. This was mainly because this province, bordering the Ottoman Empire, had enjoyed religious tolerance from the 16th century onwards. Most of the Protestants living in Transylvania went abroad to study at Protestant universities like Wittenberg, Halle, Göttingen and Leyden and thus escaped the Jesuit dominated education of the Habsburg universities which had become increasingly out of date in the course of the 18th century. Even a quarter of a century after the abolition of the Jesuits, and following the reforms during the period of enlightend absolutism, the Habsburg universities were still far from being first rate in most subjects.So the majority of Transylvanian Protestant priests, lawyers and physicians were educated at universites in the north of the German speaking world or in the Netherlands, thus becoming members of a scientific community which could be regarded as belonging to the best in the world of scholarship. The impact on Transylvania was enormous because many of these scholars used modern scholarship and research methods and kept close to a world of learning which was geographically so distant from Transylvania.