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This book tells the story of the Jesuit mission to Cluj, Transylvania (now Romania) from 1693, when the Jesuits were allowed to return after almost a century of restricted activity in the region, until 1773, when the order was suppressed. During these eight decades the Jesuits created a complex, multi-faceted community whose impact reached throughout Transylvania and beyond into neighbouring regions. In addition to an ongoing missionary program in this predominantly non-Catholic region, the Jesuits established a cluster of schools and a university that trained the elite, introduced Baroque architecture, music and literature, and became the masters of extensive properties. The Jesuits' school...
Addresses the experience of Jesuit missionaries, teachers and writers along the peripheries of the Habsburg lands, which stretched to Moldavia, Ukraine, Serbia and Wallachia, and which was continually riven with ethnic tensions. The time scale of the study is from the "high tide" of the Society (often labeled "the first multinational corporation") in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century, until its suppression in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV. The book examines several of the communities situated along the periphery and the records that they left behind about their interactions with the local populations. It constructs a vivid picture of Jesuit life on the frontier that is built up in mosaic fashion and livened by compelling anecdotes. The Jesuits of Royal Hungary exercised a baroque expression modeled after the larger western cities of the Habsburg lands, which was a fragile splendor in part defined by the need to defend Catholicism from the hostility of Orthodox, Lutherans, Calvinists, and others.
This book is a study on the beginnings of Hungarian political thought, as set out by two 17th century mirrors of princes, the first attempts at political theorising in the Hungarian vernacular. The unlikely source text for these treatises was an advice book by King James the VIth and Ist to his son, Basilikon Doron. As an analysis of the translation and re-reading of a widely circulated text by the king of England and Scotland, the book is also a study in early modern cross-cultural dialogue, situated in the context of recent discussions on transculturalism, and more specifically on the intellectual connections between Britain and the world. The various contemporary translations of King Jame...
This book is a novel attempt to understand humanism as a socially meaningful cultural idiom in late Renaissance East Central Europe. Through an exploration of geographical regions that are relatively little known to an English reading public, it argues that late sixteenth-century East Central Europe was culturally thriving and intellectually open in the period between Copernicus and Galileo. Humanism was a dominant cluster of shared intellectual practices and cultural values that brought a number of concrete benefits both to the social-climber intellectual and to the social elite. Two exemplary case studies illustrate this thesis in substantive detail, and highlight the ambivalences and diff...
Despite the fact that, if only by number, small and peripheral cities played an important role in fifteenth and sixteenth-century European print culture, book history has mainly been dominated by monographs on individual big book centres. Through a number of specific case studies, which deploy a variety of methods and a wide range of sources, this volume seeks to enhance our understanding of printing and the book trade in small and peripheral European cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and to emphasize the necessity of new research for the study of print culture in such cities.
The textual heritage of Medieval Latin is one of the greatest reservoirs of human culture. Repertories list more than 16,000 authors from about 20 modern countries. Until now, there has been no introduction to this world in its full geographical extension. Forty contributors fill this gap by adopting a new perspective, making available to specialists (but also to the interested public) new materials and insights. The project presents an overview of Medieval (and post-medieval) Latin Literatures as a global phenomenon including both Europe and extra-European regions. It serves as an introduction to medieval Latin's complex and multi-layered culture, whose attraction has been underestimated un...
The Annual Bibliography of the History of the Printed Book and Libraries aims at recording articles of scholarly value which relate to the history of the printed book, to the history of arts, crafts, techniques and equipment, and of the economic social and cultural environment, involved in its production, distribution, conservation and description.
Pál Ács discusses various aspects of the cultural and literary history of Hungary during the hundred years that followed the Battle of Mohács (1526) and the onset of the Reformation. The author focuses on the special Ottoman context of the Hungarian Reformation movements including the Protestant and Catholic Reformation and the spiritual reform of Erasmian intellectuals. The author argues that the Ottoman presence in Hungary could mean the co-existence of Ottoman bureaucrats and soldiers with the indigenous population. He explores the culture of occupied areas, the fascinating ways Christians came to terms with Muslim authorities, and the co-existence of Muslims and Christians. Ács treat...
Conceived as another chapter in the European history of religions (Europäische Religionsgeschichte), this book deals with the intense dynamics of the overlapping political, ethnic, and denominational constellations in Reformation and post-Reformation Transylvania. Navigating along multiple narrative tracks, and attempting to treat the religious history of an entire region over a limited time period in a differentiated, polyfocal way, the book represents a departure from the master narratives of any singularly oriented religious history. At the same time, the present work seeks to contribute to laying the groundwork at the micro- and meso-contextual level of East-Central European confessionalization processes, and to developing interpretive models for these processes in the region.
Silent Teachers considers for the first time the influence of Ottoman scholarly practices and reference tools on oriental learning in early modern Europe. Telling the story of oriental studies through the annotations, study notes, and correspondence of European scholars, it demonstrates the central but often overlooked role that Turkish-language manuscripts played in the achievements of early orientalists. Dispersing the myths and misunderstandings found in previous scholarship, this book offers a fresh history of Turkish studies in Europe and new insights into how Renaissance intellectuals studied Arabic and Persian through contemporaneous Turkish sources. This story hardly has any dull mom...