Institute of History
Topic
The care of orphaned and abandoned children in towns of the Kingdom of Hungary in the first half of the nineteenth century
PhD. program
World History
Year of admission
2026
Name of the supervisor
Ingrid Kušniráková, PhD.
Contact:
Receiving school
Faculty of Arts, Comenius University Bratislava
Annotation
The aim of the dissertation is to research the care of orphaned and abandoned children in towns of the Kingdom of Hungary in the first half of the nineteenth century. Children who, for various reasons, were left without parents were divided in the period under study into two groups. The first consisted of orphans who had tutors and property inherited from their parents; the second comprised orphaned and abandoned children without property and usually without tutors as well. Under existing laws, towns were obliged to supervise the administration of orphans’ property and to provide care for all categories of dependent persons, including poor orphans and foundlings. However, legislation defined only the duties of towns; the scope and manner of fulfilling these duties were determined by the towns themselves. In their research, the candidate should focus on compliance with laws regulating the administration of orphans’ property—that is, on how towns applied these laws in practice and what mechanisms they developed to supervise tutors managing the property of orphaned children. An important question is whether such supervision, in accordance with existing legislation, concerned only the management of estates or also the provision and care of the children themselves. Another level of research should address foster care and institutional care for poor orphans and foundlings. The confessional dimension of this issue will also be significant—namely, whether laws on the religious upbringing of children were respected and whether institutional or foster care became part of confessional conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. The candidate may choose a specific town for the research, or a suitably defined group of towns. Candidates are expected to have a basic overview of the political, religious, and social development of the Kingdom of Hungary in the “long” nineteenth century, as well as appropriate language skills: Slovak, German, and Latin.