God and Profit: A European View on Some Economic Doctrines

How has the relationship between God and profit evolved over time? How and to what extent has today’s European identity acquired a social component? What reverberations did and have this fact? How do they face, from such a perspective, essential economic doctrines, approached in their evolution? What projections have been seen and seen in Romania? Here are the main questions that the present study aims at answering.

Keywords : God, profit, doctrines, social, negotiation, history, realities, perspectives.

Metropolitan Andrei Şaguna – Promoter of the Movement of Emancipation through C
ulture and Education for the Romanians in 19th Century Transylvania

The history of the Romanians in Transylvania acknowledges Saint Metropolitan Andrei Şaguna’s shepherding of the Church as a reference point, that had crucially contributed to the creation of the Romanian people’s unity of conscience, which ultimately led to the Great Union in 1918. The great Metropolitan knew that a people enlightened through culture and education is thus enabled to overcome all the hardships and challenges of history and is subsequently empowered to pursue tenaciously its political and ecclesiastical goals and ideals for a union. Like a true apostle of the Transylvanian Romanians, Metropolitan Andrei Şaguna bestowed on the Transylvanian Church the treasures of his charisms, his energy and tireless fervour and the wisdom of his remarkable diplomacy, and made it bring forth a “hundredfold fruit”, i.e. he set up hundreds of religious and lay schools of all levels of education. He also supervised the compilation of school manuals and syllabuses, and the training of school teachers. Yet his greatness actually lies in that he managed all these amid extremely harsh political conditions. He was intuitively certain that only the existence of a solid Orthodox confessional educational program would allow the Romanians to exist as a nation and play an active role in Transylvania’s social-political life, which would eventually contribute to the achievement of the national union of all Romanians from the three Romanian Provinces.

Keywords: History of Transylvania, Church History, Confessional Education, Transylvanian Art and Culture

The Evolution of Chinese Characters

The present article is a section from a larger study entitled The History and Culture of Chinese Characters and serves as a continuation of my first article named The History and Origin of Chinese Characters (I). The purpose of the article is to exemplify the changes Chinese characters underwent during its history of evolution. Each of the 7 stages of development led to the final Simplified Characters that Chinese speaking people use nowadays. Chinese characters evolved from pictographic characters, created on the foundation of a picture, to pictophonetic characters, based on the meaning of strokes; from the Traditional complex characters to the Simplified easy to write characters; from different writing tools and materials to ink and paper; thus far one of the most widely used language created its own unique method of writing. Throughout the paper I will retell stories that contribute to the discovery of the Chinese characters, sustain my paper with either self-drawn characters or with pictures exemplifying the calligraphy of the specific script.

Keywords: Wang Yi Rong , Bronze ware, Qin Shi Huang , Scribe, Ancient characters, Modern characters, Zhong Yao, Zhang Xu, The Chinese Reform Committee, Simplified characters.

The Translation Faults in our Stars: Shakespeare’s References to Astrology and their Romanian Translations

William Shakespeare’s plays abound with references to astrology. As a contemporary of renowned Renaissance astrologers and astronomers such as Johannes Kepler, Nicolaus Copernicus and John Dee, living and writing at a time when the science of the stars was at the height of its popularity, the Bard used the celestial bodies and their movement as a means to foreshadow the development of his plays and to give additional insight into the personality of his characters and their motives. Yet, not a few are the occasions in which the playwright, through his dramatis personae, also contends their influence upon human behaviour. By drawing parallels between his astrological references and their autochthonous translations, what the present article aims at achieving is to elicit scholarly interest in the manner in which Romanian translators have handled this aspect of Shakespeare’s rhetoric.

Keywords: astrology, references, Romanian, Shakespeare, translation.

“Memories of Childhood” by Ion Creangă: Style and Stylistics

The unrivalled virtue possessed by Ion Creangă is that of revealing and using the creative force of popular words. The writer creates in a popular style, keeping the regional phonetics, the easiness of the colloquial speech, the proverbs and sayings. The “spoken” character of Ion Creangă’s language manifests itself with the greatest strength in idiomatic expressions. Any passage from Ion Creangă’s work – be it a long or a short one – contains such stylistic particularities. The paper attempts to emphasize the relevance of the combination of the two stylistics: the so-called literary stylistics and the linguistic one, for the understanding of Ion Creangă’s way of writing.

Keywords: Creangă, vocabulary, stylistic analysis, archaic words, regional words.

Understanding & Autofiction

The article presents an attempt to define autofiction in a specific philosophical and historical context. In a weak ontology, the alienated individual of developed urban societies operates a change in his discursive strategy, replacing the chronological description with the narrative means of fiction. This change has multiple consequences, including the emergence of tension between narrative dialectics and existential truth. The significance of autofiction is built from both personal truth and fiction, and the ultimate criterion of this discursive genre is not the artistic realization, but the truth about (own)life.

Keywords: autofiction, discursive strategy, existential author, autobiographical pact, authenticity

Paternal figure’s images in Claudiu Komartin, Dmitri Miticov and Diana Geacăr’s poems

A spectre of authority, an embodiment of the violence or a spirit whose evanescence leads to irrecoverable traumas, the father’s figure appears frequently enough in Romanian contemporary poetry. Komartin brings his ‘old man’ on the scene, inside a vortex of vibrant images, while Miticov locates his father’s figure outside the text, as a beholder of the show who is also observed. In other words, Miticov’s poetic discourse flows on the background of his father’s dissapearance, while Komartin’s poetry is happening ‘right here, right now’. Diana Geacăr’s oscillation between a child’s hypostasis and an adult’s one generates an apparently impersonal tone which is trying to absorbe the authority’s characteristics. All in all, this essay analyzes certain discourses built around the father’s figure, in order to observe if there exists a current mechanism of the autobiographic poem functioning as a performance.

Keywords: contemporary Romanian poetry, performance, authority, paternal figure, beholder, actor.

Gheorghe Crăciun: The Ipseity and Alterity of the Body

Gheorghe Crăciun’s conception of the body and its relationship to literature has been the one that the author himself has placed at the very centre of his theoretical and aesthetic thought, and consequently among the most discussed aspects of his work. This article aims to situate this issue within the larger aesthetic and philosophical tradition of modernity and to trace its origins back to the late eighteenth-century discovery of subjectivity and its implications. The main argument is that the “body” can be best grasped in terms of self-knowledge and self-consciousness, with two possible interconnected developments: on the one hand, the idea that literary creation is to be conceived as introspection and as expressing the uniqueness of the self, and on the other, the affirmation of the consubstantiality of self and world, the “body” being described as intuition or responsiveness to a dimension of the world that is inaccessible to rational knowledge, but retrievable through aesthetic expression.

Keywords: contemporary Romanian literature, Gheorghe Crăciun, subjectivity, self, body, conceptual language

Ioana Em. Petrescu: Life with Form and Life without Form

Departing from Ioana Em. Petrescu’s recent edition of American letters, which includes texts written between 1981 and 1983 during a Fulbright grant’s period spent in Los Angeles, I aim to analyze what sort of difficulties in grasping the Western way of life are encountered by a Romanian intellectual coming from a totalitarian country. I could feel that Ioana Em. Petrescu’s distinction between the American “form of life” and the Romanians’ “regime of life” has the potential of unfolding of totalitarian life from a viewpoint centered on life styles. This sort of relationship helps us differentiate not only between two particular forms of living, one that is American, the other, Romanian. It also proves the impossibility of totalitarianism, of political regimes that forbid every attempt at regulating/ ritualizing lives and eventually at following a stylistic of life. The phrase “regime of life” and its possible meanings indicate in fact that life under Communism means living outside forms.
Keywords: totalitarianism, form of life, regime of life, the society of the spectacle, Ioana Em. Petrescu.

Preliminary study of early medieval pottery in Capidava in the VIIIth sector

Even though the Romanian-Byzantine fortress of Capidava has been archaeologically studied as early as 1924, there are new discoveries which continue to appear and change the statu quo of the research. The ceramic lot we present here has been discovered in the exacavations undertaken between 2001-2004 on the sout-eastern side of the fortress, conventikonally referred to as sector VIII. There have been discovered a series of clay dwellings, as well as a precinct wall. The findings show an extension of the medium-Byzantine fortification, with a much larger surface than the Romano-Byzantine one.

Keywords: modern and contemporary archaeology, early medieval pottery, Capidava, VIIIth sector

Some perspectives upon the presence of the Norico-pannonian pottery and their fabrication
in the Roman settlement from Ocna Sibiului-Fața Vacilor / La Făgădău

The salt deposits from Ocna Sibiului contributed to the birth of some Roman settlements in this area. One of these, is the settlement from Ocna Sibiului-Fața Vacilor, which belonged to the Norico-pannonian settlers. As a result of archaeological researches, some important discoveries have been made, as for instance, a pottery kiln, ornamentation and processing tools for pottery, a fragment from a traditional pot with inscription. All these discoveries prove that here used to function a workshop, which was specialised in the production of the typical pottery for Norico-pannonian communities.

Keywords: Norico-pnnonians, Celts, Roman pottery workshop, pottery kiln, Ocna Sibiului

A reconsideration of the coins from the Dacian hoard found at Agârbiciu (Sibiu County)

The inventory register of the Brukenthal National Museum mentions, among the numbers 4552 and 4559, a small hoard made of two fragmented silver fibulae, five coins issued by the city of Dyrrhachium and one of bronze, not allocated to an issuer. According to the register, the hoard was discovered 3/4 kilometers from the village of Agârbiciu, at the point: Hinter dem Ramreg, by Ioan Bârsa, a village resident. The hoard was initially published by Kurt Horedt, but with some mistakes. After reviewing the existing information, it seems that the treasury contained the following coins:
1. Dyyrhachium – 1 ΠΥΡΒΑ / ΞΕΝΟΝ (-13); 1 ФIΛΛIA / ΞΕΝΟΝ (-10); 1 KAΛΛΩΝΟΣ / MENIΣKOΣ (-6); ΛΥΚΙΣΚΟΥ / MENIΣKOΣ (-4); 1 MENIΣΚΟΥ / ΦΙΛΟΝ (-3).
2. Roman imperial copper alloy coin, as or dupondius.

Keywords: Agârbiciu, Dacian hoard, Dyyrhachium, ancient coins, fibula.

Mendicant orders in medieval Transylvania in written sources

Starting with the 13th century, the mendicant orders began to intensify their activity. The preacher or dominican monks were among the first mendicants tospread towards eastern Europe, settling down in Transylvania as well. Shortly after, the brothers of St. Francis followed. By the next century the mendicant network encompassed also the brothers of St. Augustine’s order, those of St. Paul the First Hermit. This paper aims to emphasize – by means of documents – their institutional importance, from both the perspective of the papal authority and the one of the Hungarian royalty, and their activity from the perspective of mendicant orders exercising their beliefs and misionary activism in Transylvania between the 13th-15th century.

Keywords: mendicant orders, Transylvania, written sources, middle ages.

County heads and counties in medieval Banat, Crișana and Maramureș
as reflected by documents issued between 1201-1241

The expansion of the Hungarian realm has met its final phase of incorporating Transylvania during the first half of the 13th century. This territory began to be attached to the realm during the start of the 11thcentury. That process ended sometime during the first decades of the1200s. At the same time with the realm’s expansion, the territorial restructuring of Transylvania took place. This had started during the last decades of the previous century, when the first so called counties had emerged. The counties of Banat, Crișana and Maramureș had entered a phase of reorganization during the first half of the 13thcentury. This phase was triggered by the realm’s administrative policies. The present paper aims to portray the evolution of the medieval administrative-territorial structures in the eastern part of the Hungarian realm, with emphasis on the counties located in what is currently known as Banat, Crișana and Maramureș, namely the western and south-western part of Romania. In comparison with the previous century, the first half of the 13th one is rich in primary sources, in documents, which allow us to trace back the historical evolution of these particular administrative-territorial units.

Keywords: medieval documents, counties, 13th century in Transylvania, Banat, Crișana, Maramureș.

Potter’s marks from the sites on Târnava Mare valley (8th-13th century)

The article presents pots with potter’s marks discovered on the Târnava Mare valley in the habitat sites of Bratei – Așezarea nr. 2, Sighișoara – Dealul Viilor, Medișorul Mare – Locul grădinilor, Mureni – Vizlak, as well as from the necropolis sites in Bratei – Cimitirul nr.2 and Mediaș – Dealul Furcilor. These archeological sites fall within Transylvania’s archeological context of pottery findings with pottery marks. The main pottery marks described are decorated by means of circle with different variations, the cross and the quadrilateral forms. They have symbolic meanings expressing superstitions and beliefs. Are there crafts centers on the Târnava Mare Valley? The oven from Sighisoara – Dealul Viilor is dated back to the 8th century (or 7th to8th according to Dan Băcueț-Crișan). We could assume the existence of three such centers: one in the Micăsasa-Mediaş-Bratei area, the other in Sighişoara and a third in the Odorhei area. During the Roman period there was a road leading from Alba Iulia, passing through Micăsasa, Bratei and Sighisoara to Odorhei. The same route is confirmed on the Josephine map. Therefore, we can speak of the existence of a trade route.

Keywords: potter’s mark, Târnava Mare, habitat, necropolis, craft centers, trade route.