Volume XXV (2020), no.2

The study deals with 16th and 17th century Hungarian printed polemical works considering religious disputes a typical form of communication in the age of Reformation and Catholic renewal. Its conceptual framework is the paradigm or research method of the long Reformation as an efficient assistance to the discovery and appreciation of early modern theological-religious diversity. The analysis examines several kinds of communication which occurs in the (religious) dispute, and explores the rules and conventions along which the (verbal) fighting takes place. Research shows that the opponents repeatedly refer to the rules of dialectics refuting each other’s standpoints accusing them of faulty argumentation, i.e., the wrong use of syllogisms. Dialectics is, namely, in this context not the ars with the help of which truth is found but with which evident truth is checked and justified in a way that the opponents can also be educated to follow the right direction.

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Emperor Ferdinand II’s Catholic troops won a crushing victory over the Protestants’ army at the battle of White Mountain (Bílá Hora), near Prague, on 8 November 1620. Shortly after that, White Mountain became a place of remembrance and a symbol of prevail for the Catholic Bohemians. Servite monastery and a church attached to it, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, were built on the battlefield, with support from the Emperor, which symbolised the victory of the Emperor’s troops and that of the Catholic Church. White Mountain was an important place for Protestants as well. For Protestant Bohemians, the defeat was the beginning of the end of their religious freedom. Their works keep quiet about the events leading to and succeeding the battle. However, their narratives about the events of their personal lives and sufferings did use the name of this symbolic place as a point of reference for a new time frame. For them, White Mountain was a place, a cause, and a take-off of losing their homes and properties, and those of their compelled escapes and exiles.

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The Institute of Hungarian Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Debrecen formed a research group in 2010 in order to launch the research of Hungarian realms of memory. This paper was written within the frameworks of the research group. Its basic hypothesis is that the identification of Hungary as the Bastion of Christendom is an established part of Hungarian collective memory. This paper attempts to demonstrate the changes of this realm of memory, regarding its meaning and function, from its formation up to the present day.

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The present paper aims to examine the main directions the historical research of medieval seals has followed in the recent decades. Starting from several sigillography handbooks developed in both Western and Romanian academic environments, but also from the published inquiries of the most important contemporary scholars active in this field of study, the present article focuses on their most relevant contributions, their historiographical impact, as well as the concepts and ideas formulated and debated on these occasions. Therefore, the purpose of this approach is not only to make a brief review of the state-of-the-art research in Western sigillography, but also to point out the main directions the Romanian sigillographic research should pursue in the years to come.

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The present article approaches the ample Tsarist campaign diary (1,300 folios), describing Moldavia and Wallachia’s 1848-1850 military occupation by the Russian 5th army corps led by general commander Alexander Nikolaevich Lüders, and the protecting power’s armed interventions in Transylvania (1849). The echoes of this long military campaign were feebler at that time, than those of the much- clamored Russian campaign in Hungary (June-August 1849). Ignored so far by the Russian and Romanian historiographies (even if for different reasons), the 1848-1850 occupation of the Romanian Lands is minutely related by an unknown source, recently discovered in the Russian State Military-Historical Archive in Moscow and edited by us. Also analyzed  the difficult conditions of access in the War Archive of  the  former Tsarist Empire, today Eastern Europe’s largest military archive of medieval and modern history.

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The present study reviews D. Popovici’s founding attempts in the field of literary history. It pursues his activity along four  axes:  critical editions of modern Romanian authors,  studies  in  literary history, university lectures and “Studii literare” [Literary Studies], the scientific journal he founded as a professor of Cluj University. Both original and modern in his theoretic, methodologic as well as academic options, Popovici is a founder of institutions and initiator of a research school. His scientific projects are singular in their scope. Yet his critic posterity destines him to an unwarranted “singularity”. Our reflection focuses upon the exemplary elements in the scholar’s destiny.

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