Knowledge in Circulation: Methods of Birth Control among Slovak Women in the 1920s and 1930s 

Eva Škorvanková

Comenius University, Faculty of Arts

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 15 Issue 3 (2026): 464-493  DOI 10.38145/2026.3.464

This study considers the dissemination of knowledge about methods of birth control among Slovak women in the 1920s and 1930s. Focusing on practices based on tracking the menstrual cycle and periodic abstinence, it draws on contemporary statistical data, ethnographic research, and a wide range of sources, including health-education literature, women’s periodicals, and the activities of social organizations. The article analyses the multiple channels through which such knowledge circulated, from medical discourse and church environments to informal networks among women. It argues that, despite the Catholic Church’s rejection of birth control, these methods became part of women’s birth control strategies, revealing tensions between medical knowledge, moral norms, and everyday practice. In doing so, the study adds to the historiography of reproductive health and gender by highlighting women’s agency in the negotiation of competing normative frameworks.

Keywords: natural birth control, reproductive health, women’s agency, interwar Czechoslovakia, knowledge circulation

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Iconizing Motherhood, Ignoring Mothers: Romanian Forty-Eighter Women, Public Health, and 
the Limits of  Maternal Medicalization

Ioana Moroşan

Research Institute of the University of Bucharest

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 15 Issue 3 (2026): 435-463  DOI 10.38145/2026.3.435

One of the earliest public representations of women in Romanian culture is closely tied to maternal identity. In nineteenth-century Romania, women gained political legitimacy both through their association with politically active men and through their status as mothers, which was reframed as a national mission within the broader emergence of nationalism. This romanticized image of motherhood coexisted alongside a persistent crisis of midwifery and the uneven medicalization of childbirth, revealing a significant gap between the Romanian sphere and other Central and Eastern European contexts. The entry into the public sphere of women involved in the Revolutions of 1848, notably Maria Rosetti (1819–1893), combined with the revolutionary and philanthropic ethos of the period fostered engagement among women in initiatives related to public health and the diffusion of medical knowledge. By tracing key moments in the development of medicalization and the medical crisis of the nineteenth century, this study examines both the scope and the limits of these women’s interventions, with particular attention to the life and career of Maria Rosetti. It highlights the paradox of their participation in public health: while they contributed to the dissemination of medical practices, their involvement remained shaped by gendered constraints and did not fundamentally challenge the growing exclusion of women from the medical profession. At the same time, the article argues that figures such as Maria Rosetti functioned as important intermediaries in the process of medicalization, particularly in contexts in which institutional medical structures remained underdeveloped.

Keywords: Revolution of 1848, medical crisis, midwives, women’s exclusion, medicaliza­tion of childbirth, maternal body, nationalism

Sir Henry Drummond Wolff and British Strategy in Eastern Rumelia (1878–1879) 

Nadezhda Vasileva

Institute for Historical Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 15 Issue 2 (2026): 389-416 DOI 10.38145/2026.2.389

This article examines Sir Henry Drummond Wolff’s diplomatic mission to Eastern Rumelia between 1878 and 1879 as a calculated instrument of British foreign policy in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War 1877–1878. Appointed as Britain’s representative to the European Commission for the organization of Eastern Rumelia established by the Treaty of Berlin, Wolff played a central role in drafting the Organic Statute and shaping the administrative structure of the newly formed Ottoman province in Southern Bulgaria. His mission had a broader geostrategic objective: to safeguard British interests in the region and contain the growing influence of the Russian Empire in the Near East. The study argues that Wolff’s involvement in the European Commission was not merely technical but deeply political, anchored in Britain’s determination to preserve its imperial interests near the Straits and to prevent the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire as a buffer against Russian expansion. Eastern Rumelia thus emerges in this context as a focal point of British–Russian rivalry during a critical moment in the reordering of south­eastern Europe under the Berlin settlement.

Keywords: Eastern Rumelia, Wolff, Salisbury, Anglo-Russian rivalry, Ottoman Empire, Treaty of Berlin, Near East, Eastern Question

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Scholars as Agents: The Influence of Hungarian Explorers, Felix Kanitz, 
Adolf Strausz, and Lajos Thallóczy on Austria–Hungary’s Policy
Towards the Balkan Peninsula (1870–1904)

Gábor Demeter

ELTE Research Centre for the Humanities

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 15 Issue 2 (2026): 348-388 DOI 10.38145/2026.2.348

Drawing on unpublished Austrian (Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv) and Hungarian archival sources and also a comparative analysis of the diaries and published scholarly works of travelers, this paper examines how Austro-Hungarian scholars exploring the Balkans contributed to diplomatic intelligence activities between the 1870s and 1900s.

Fundamentally, it considers the extent to which the scholars were able to influence diplomatic actions and foreign policy of the Dual Monarchy. Focusing, as case studies, on Felix Kanitz, Adolf Strausz, and Lajos Thallóczy, it places special emphasis on the ways in which national and imperial directives provoked rivalries (or cooperation) between the two major political entities of Austria–Hungary. Additionally, the paper examines whether these scholars acted as intermediaries for Balkan countries while serving their home government.

Keywords: scholars, agents, travels, Austria–Hungary, Balkan Peninsula, economic penetration, intelligence services

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From the Hungarian Plains to the Balkans: János Asztalos’s Revolutionary 
Exile and  the Idea of a Danubian Confederation (1869–1870)

Penka Peykovska

Institute for Historical Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 15 Issue 2 (2026): 326-347 DOI 10.38145/2026.2.326

The article examines the revolutionary activities of János Asztalos, leader of the 1868 Hungarian peasant movement, during his exile in the Balkans and his efforts to pro­mote a Danubian Confederation. Drawing on archival documents, including Austro-Hungarian consular reports and contemporary press accounts, it reconstructs Asztalos’s initiatives in Vidin, Bucharest, and Constantinople, including the founding of his “Hungarian–Bulgarian Secret Committee” and his attempts to unite Hungarian émigrés, South Slavs, and Romanians in a common struggle against Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian domination. The study situates Asztalos within broader nineteenth-century transnational revolutionary networks, highlighting the circulation of the ideas of Lajos Kossuth and Asztalos’s interaction with émigré movements and local nationalist initiatives. While the committee’s activities were brief and primarily Hungarian in character, they reveal an ambitious attempt to coordinate anti-imperial efforts in the Balkans. Asztalos’s political work, though limited in direct impact, provides valuable insight into the strategies, connections, and ideological exchanges of revolutionary émigrés in Central and Southeastern Europe.

Keywords: Danubian Confederation, agent network, Hungarian revoutionaries in exile, Bulgarian national awakening, Vidin, 19th century

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Surveilling the Danube: The Austrian Consulate in Vidin (1848–1878)* 

Simeon A. Simeonov

American University in Bulgaria

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ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5358-2804

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 15 Issue 2 (2026): 307-325 DOI 10.38145/2026.2.307 

This article examines the establishment and expansion of the Austrian consular network in the Lower Danube region with a focus on the town of Vidin in the period between the Hungarian and Wallachian Revolutions and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. In the 1830s, the Habsburg Empire established a firm consular presence on the left bank of the Lower Danube in the Danubian Principalities, but over the course of the next decades and particularly in the 1850s, it also progressively expanded into the northernmost part of the Ottoman Empire south of the river. The article seeks to illuminate the significance of one hitherto insufficiently examined node in this nascent Austrian consular network, the vice-consulate/consulate in Vidin, the second most populous Ottoman settlement on the Lower Danube (after the rapidly advancing Ruse farther downstream). This Austrian extraterritorial office, the article argues, served as a crucial information, commercial, political, and diplomatic agency in a region characterized by economic growth and marred by episodes of international warfare in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Keywords: consuls, Balkans, Vidin, Hungarian Revolution, Danube, Ottoman Empire

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