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This paper aims to present the case, in many ways surprising, of the versified letters of the Romanian peasant soldiers, built according to the metrics, style and structures of traditional oral poetry. From the beginning, in the Romanian context, the writings of ordinary people have become an object of exclusive interest for ethnographers and folklorists. This disciplinary option, which has cut out specific philological, literary or historical interests, has had several consequences, that the paper tries to point out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper refers to three essential parameters for a historian and the historical source: the truth, the reality and the subjective vision, which was strained by the author voluntarily or unintentionally at the time of its elaboration. We will not refer to the subject as a whole, but we will analyze a particular document, a Report of Arutiun Tumanian, a member of the National committee of Armenians from Bessarabia. In our intervention we will focus on two aspects, firstly on the demographic data about Armenians in the space between the Prut and Dniester rivers, and secondly on their position in the society of Bessarabia. In this study we will analyze the data provided by Arutiun Tumanian, and we’ll also investigate the subjective purposes that have determined the author to express the information in a certain way [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early March 1462, Pius II did a highly uncommon gesture for a powerful and experienced politician: he made an open and sincere admission to the Milanese ambassador in Rome, the astute Otto de carretto. It is in the pages of this undeniable confession of the pope (a confession initiated by the pope himself) that Matthias corvinus, son of John Hunyadi, was mentioned for the first time as King of Hungary and Dacia. Dacia may have been a backup plan for Matthias, in case he irretrievably lost the Holy crown of Hungary (held by the Roman-German emperor Frederick III of Habsburg until the end of 1463). On the other hand, Matthias’ Dacia could have emerged from the bloody ambitions of John Hunyadi and Vlad II Dracul, the parents of Matthias corvinus and Vlad III the Impaler. unquestionably, in the Middle Ages (chiefly in the 13th and 14th centuries), on the political and confessional levels, Dacia was employed foremost to designate the Kingdom of Denmark (due to a historical-geographical confusion beyond the scope of this paper). still, the northern territory was also correctly referred to in contemporary sources as Dania. In the second half of the 15th century, the situation began to significantly change as the name Dacia returned to the Lower Danube area, the only region where the Roman empire had founded a province (and later several) by this name. In the spring of 1462, the Kingdom of Dacia north of the Danube was undoubtedly an european reality for the Papacy and for the Duchy of Milan. It was a reality particularly for Pope Pius II, a great admirer of John Hunyadi, and also for the Milanese duke Francesco sforza, who had done his apprenticeship as a condottiere alongside John, the son of Voicu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper surveys the Italian historiography (various generations of authors) on the communist regime in Romania during the time of Nicolae Ceauçescu, from the apologists of the regime to its critical analysts. It could be argued that the negative historical judgments on the regime are definitely in the majority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this paper is to describe the process of unionization of civil and penal trials undertaken by the Communist authorities after 1948, focusing on the Cluj Bar. Despite the high expectations, the unionization caused just discontent among the lawyers, even if few of them showed it explicitly. the unionization was abolished after two years, being replaced by a new system, which left more potential earnings to the single lawyer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using some fundamental concepts of translation studies, the first part of this paper presents a number of relevant aspects of Matei Vişniec's dramatic œuvre and analyzes the bilingual status of this writer. The paper focuses, on the one hand, on the representation of the traumatic history of the twentieth century in Eastern European and Balkan cultures and, on the other hand, on the examination of some postmodern themes and aesthetic elements of Vişniec's dramatic writings. The relation established between human beings and power/history is widely explored by the playwright through the internal mechanisms that govern totalitarian societies, but also through a comprehensive survey, intended to identify, in a critical perspective, the strategies of consumerism and the modalities of mass manipulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The end of WWI, the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Great Union determined an upward unitary development in all fields of activity, compared with previous periods. This paper presents the evolution of the health care assistance and of the pharmaceutical sector through the interwar period to the nationalization (1920-1948), as well as the main legislative regulations. In this period, there was real progress in Bihor county in the development of Romanian medical science, the health care legislation improved, hospitals and nursing homes were built, the number of sanitary circumscriptions increased, the number of pharmacies increased, and the supply of medicinal products improved etc. The pharmaceutical sector included urban and rural public pharmacies, clinic and hospital pharmacies, and hand pharmacies for emergencies. The fundamental act issued in this period was the health care and protection law of 1930, with long-term provisions, valid until 1944. In spite of all the progress recorded in those years in the protection of health, the documents of Bihor county's Health Service and Protection show a high frequency of contagious diseases, due to social-economic conditions and the population's low level of medical culture, especially in rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the corpus of Old French chivalric literature, both epic poems and prose chivalric romances, the Perlesvaus undisputedly surpasses all other texts in one respect: the quantity and intensity of violent scenes. These episodes are often narrated resorting to such levels of smug descriptive insistence as to lead great Arthurian-literature expert Roger Sherman Loomis to suspect a pathological inclination towards sadism in the anonymous author of the text. Due to its goriness and its display of slaughterous fantasies, the torment of the Lord of the Fens is surely one of the most disconcerting scenes in the work. By means of an in-depth analysis of the anthropological elements found in this episode, the paper identifies a coherent substrate of a ceremonial nature. This substrate is on the one hand reminiscent of primeval sacrificial practices, and on the other hand linked to dethronement procedures that have been documented in various traditional cultures. Far from being the expression of a morbid attraction to the gory and bloody, the atrocious agonies inflicted upon the Lord of the Fens by Perlesvaus seem instead to be modelled after primeval ritual frameworks, which foreground the connection between violence, power and sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The episode of "Tristan and Isolt in the Forest of Morrois" in the anglonormand Beroul's Roman de Tristan (XII c.) is one of the most complex and controverse of the entire work. In this paper the author proposes a new reading, pointing out possible biblical and theological references. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to reconstruct the mythical background of the romanian epic-oral song about Constantin Brâncoveanu's martyrdom. The historical figure of Bràncoveanu, prince of Wallachia between 1688 and 1714, who was beheaded by the Ottomans, in romanian folklore is conceived not simply as a saint and a sacred figure but as a cosmic figure as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the Transylvanian carol Miorifa. Sentenced to death by his mates, a young shepherd gives them detailed instructions about the ritual setting of the execution and the burial of the body. Differently from the well-known ballad on the same subject, the carol presents a specific functionality, structure and thematic development that should be related to characteristics of the ritual genre. In this paper we will analyze the core-part of the carol--the shepherd's testament--from the point of view of funeral ritual complex and imagery in Romanian popular tradition. A special focus will be made on the atypical burial requested by the shepherd to his mates-killers: the hero's instructions lead us to think that his imminent death belongs to a particular category of deaths - unnatural, untimely deaths. This idea will be discussed with reference to semantics and spacial dimensions of death ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to show an insight on what meant the relationship between the State represented by its administrative structures and the Lipovan Community. The author attempts to establish the actions and the attitudes of the State towards the communal development, as well to illustrate the imaginary profile of the community of Lipovans formulated by the State. A special attention is paid to the imagined profile of the imperial power, in the collective mindset of the Orthodox community OF Old Rite, to the profile of the Tsarist regime - as the main source of power in Imperial Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since its beginning, media has had a great impact upon society. The first newspapers date far back in time to distant China, to the year 911. In Europe, the first newspaper was issued in Anvers in 1605 and from that moment on the newspapers and journals would bring their contribution to the education of their readers, to disseminating information and culture, to forging and later on to manipulating public opinion. The press developed in Southeastern Europe especially during the 19th century, when the emerging nations need it in order to enlighten their people and determine them to fight for their independence. In the three Romanian Provinces the intellectual elite would approach different topics and examples from the life and history of other nations, thus stirring the Romanians to fight for their emancipation and liberty. This paper makes an analysis of the image of the English and of England in the collective mentality of the Romanians, as it appears in various newspapers and journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper intends to deal with the way history is seen and used in magical realist writings, namely as a subjective view on things happened in the past, precisely because the past can be known only by means of documents, testimonies a.s.o. of other people. Hence, memory plays an important role in telling (his) tories. In Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie and Isabel Allende's novels, the reader clearly distinguishes echoes of the historical events occurring in the respective countries, but these events are shaped by the characters' personal perspectives, which constitute alternative versions to the official History [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents some documents from the Archivio di Stato di Venezia about the political movements in Transylvania during the last years of the 17th century, especially regarding Emerich Thököly's uprising against the Habsburgs. It features the most important information about his life and his political and military actions and analyses the most relevant documents, which accurately describe each step taken by the rebel leader. The documents from the Inquisitori di Stato and Bailo a Costantinopoli, featuring letters received by Thököly from certain confidents as well as those sent to the Venetian representatives at Constantinople, which describe the events occurred between 1684 and 1700, demonstrate the importance of Thököly's anti-Habsburg uprising for the ruling class of the Serenissima. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author turn to good account some information regarding medieval Oradea (11th-17th centuries) received from the writings of the foreign travelers who came into contact, on the occasion of military events or other occurrences, with the city on the Crisu Repede river. It involves the ecclesiastic architectural complex -- monasteries, cathedrals, the Bishopric Palace and the fortifications that once served to defend the city (earth wall, palisade, pile wall, stone wall and brick wall), insisting on the pentagonal fortress built between the 16th-17th centuries with its exterior and interior walls and the Princely Palace included in the interior walls. Aspects pertaining to fairs and to the multiethnic, multiconfessional and multicultural society of Oradea are also included in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims at revealing the historical value of one of the mass media used by Romanian elites in their effort of redefining the roles women and family should have in the Romanian society of the 19th century. Two were in fact the main objectives we aimed at achiving: first to stress the importance that printed press has as an historical resource for the study of women and family history and, secondly to reveal how press perfectly mirrored some of the great debates of the Transylvanian society during this century. As a society has at its basis the women and the family, what we intended to point out is how the Romanian journals, such as Gazeta Transilvaniei, Familia, Amicul Familiei were used as disseminating and formative tools for educating the women or correcting some bad habits caused by the modernity in the family areal. Moreover, our intention was also of studying the journals form a gender perspective as they represent indeed a major media in which the debate over women's condition and role in the society developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the library of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658-1730), scientist, military engineer and diplomat of the Habsburgs during the Hungarian wars, then founder of the Istituto delle Scienze in Bologna, in order to understand his image of the Balkan world. For this purpose, the paper discusses the creation of Marsigli's library, by ascertaining when he gathered it (mainly between 1696 and 1703), in which way (contacts with intellectuals and booksellers, thematic bibliographies) and on the basis of what criteria (to build a reference library for politicians); then, it identifies the 37 works about Balkan matters Marsigli got and analyzes them quantitatively and qualitatively. The emerging image is heavily conditioned at a cultural level: Marsigli chose important books, but solely written in Western languages and mainly referring to the Hungarian regions and to the Greek-Turkish world, and he neglected the Slavic and Romanian areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper outlines the historical context in which, during the First World War, the Romanian Legion in Italy was created in June 1918, at Avezzano. Led by Brigadier General Vittorio Zuppelli, the Legion consisted of Romanian prisoners of war who had previously belonged to the Austro- Hungarian army. The three Romanian companies integrated into the Italian army distinguished themselves in the battles that led to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian forces and brought about the end of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prison and literature. In order to the huge literary production in centuries (high, good and mediocre literature; memoirs, fictions, essays, etc), can prison be considered just a where or better a reason why? Since literature in and from prison is not a genre itself, is it possible to trace out coordinates (formal and conceptual ones) at least for some part of such literature? The present paper details these coordinates, for autobiographical prison literature, with the express willingness to 'tell the truth', that can be at most considered as an opposition between 'telling stories' (literature) and 'the urge to tell' (speech of truth). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marian Papahagi (1948-1999) was a prominent figure in Romanian academia, a most refined translator, a pugnacious critic, the author of trailblazing theoretical essays, and a formidable cultural organiser. Most know him for his work as an italianist. Few know that the crucial stages of the journey that shaped him as a scholar are characterised by an important phase of specialised training in the area of Neo-Latin literatures. Papahagi arrived in Rome as a twenty-year-old, and he spent there four very productive years (1968-1972), graduating in Romance Philology at "La Sapienza" University under the guidance of a great master such as Aurelio Roncaglia. His dissertation, Aspetti blasfemi nella poesia romanza delle origini ("Blasphemous aspects of early romance poetry"), is a vast monograph (456 machine-typed pages) that has never been published in its whole or partially re-utilised in subsequent works by the scholar. This paper aims to reconstruct the environment and the spirit of Papahagi's period in Rome, as well as to provide a critical and analytical account of his unpublished dissertation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a close reading of two recent novels by the German-Romanian writer Dieter Schlesak: Capesius der Auschmitzapotheker (2006) and Transylwahnien (2011). Born in 1934 among the German community of Transylvania, Schlesak deals in his novels with the tragic epic of the Holocaust, seen from the particular point of view of the transylvanian Saxons and their involvement in the Nazi crimes. More precisely, he depicts the "little homeland" of the Saxons and his dramatic dissolution, while History painfully reveals the existence of the Evil within the reassuring transylvanian Heimat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to reconstruct the traces that romanian folklore left within the works of three prominent italian writers and intellectuals of the second-half of the twentieth-century: Franco Fortini, Ernesto de Martino and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In his first book of poetry, Foglio di via (1946), Fortini translated, from a french version made by Ilarie Voronca, some romanian funeral songs, trying to conceal file folkloric sources, in order to misappropriate them. The same archaic ceremonial songs are used, as historical and ethnographic evidences, by Ernesto de Martino in his great anthropological survey on european funeral laments, Morte e pianto rituale (1958), and then by Pier Paolo Pasolini as a soundtrack for his movie Oedipus Rex (1967). In all of this cases, the fascination for the romanian popular poetry is tangled with reticences and ambiguities, that reveal the complex relationships existing between intellectuals and popular traditions in twentieth-century culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims at examining the effects of autodiegetic perspective in Odoric of Podenone's Relatio. Odoric's narrative, as well as other medieval travel accounts, such as Marco Polo's Devisement dou Monde, results from collaboration between a traveller, the Friar Minor Odoric, and a scribe, Brother William of Solagna. Nevertheless, the narration is entirely conducted in the first person. First of all, the autodiegetic narration serves a "structural" and "contextualizing" function, since it defines the geographical and chronological coordinates of the traveller's experience. Elsewhere the author represents himself as taking part in the action, in order to warrant the truthfulness of his stories. In some cases, the first-person narration enables the author to offer an interpretation of reality to the reader. Finally, in the last chapters of Odoric's account, the "autodiegesis" acquires exemplary value: the first-person narrator presents his own experience as an edifying example for other Christians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]