Volume XXI (2016), no. 2

IDEAS • BOOKS • SOCIETY • READINGS

Contents

Studies

Adrian PAPAHAGI
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
adrian.papahagi@lett.ubbcluj.ro
Abstract

Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 431 transmits letters written by John Vitéz, bishop of Oradea (1445–1465), collected in this city – and possibly copied – by the canon Paul of Iwanich, in 1451. The paper studies the palaeography of the manuscript’s opening pages, which display the attempt to abandon late Gothic angularity in favour of the rounded aspect of humanistic minuscule, in order to meet the taste of the book’s author and sponsor. However, the scribe does not manage to write an antiqua, and thus the book remains a Gothic product with humanistic aspirations.

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Csilla GÁBOR
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
gaabor.csilla@gmail.com
Abstract

The paper deals with the medieval textual variants of the frame story of The Seven Sages of Rome, known and canonised as a masterpiece of Renaissance secular entertaining prose, with special emphasis on the details of textual tradition and the types of the versions. It presents two codices that contain the text: one from Alba Iulia, the other from Budapest. The paper analyses the allegorical interpretations (geistliche Auslegungen) of the work, which are found only in manuscript versions, and which present this secular frame story and the inserted stories in a spiritual and devotional dimension, due to which these were used as exempla in sermons during the Middle Ages.

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Eszter LACZKÓ
Institution:
Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest
Email:
eszter.szlaczko@gmail.com
Abstract

The present paper focuses on the relationship between liturgy and sermon-literature. Despite the fact that theoretical summaries do not mention it, there was a common practice that can be observed in the case of the sermon-literature of the Middle Ages and thus that of Pelbartus de Themeswar, namely that the liturgical texts are used as authorities supporting the teachings within the sermon, which explain and express the faith of the Church with a legitimacy similar to other prestigious references. We can observe the operation of the proverb-like theological principle lex orandi lex credendi behind this practice, according to which liturgy is also a source of faith, and in some cases it expresses the faith of the Church even more perfectly than the somewhat abstract manifestations of theology. Pelbartus chooses this particular way of reference in sermon 74 in the summer part of the Pomerium de sanctis, in which he contemplates on the stigmatization of St Francis. The liturgical authorities employed by Pelbartus de Themeswar in his sermons are meant to prove the authenticity of Francis’s stigmata and that they are not the invention of Pelbartus. We can find the parallels of the method in the sermons of Robertus Cracciolus and Osualdus de Lasko, where these liturgical citations appear with particular emphasis on their authority-function.

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Alexandra BANEU
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
alexandra.baneu@yahoo.com
Abstract

This article focuses on three aspects of Pelbartus of Themeswar’s position on learning: how one should prepare before beginning to study theology, which sciences should one learn in order to better understand theology and in order to pursue a magisterium in this domain and, finally, what people have to learn in order to be saved. These three lines of investigation contour a true educational program.

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Katalin LUFFY
Institution:
Lucian Blaga Central University Library, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
katalin.luffy@bcucluj.ro
Abstract

The paper presents a group of letters written and received by Miklós Bethlen, preserved in the State Archives of the town of Baia Mare, containing a full history of one of the financial matters of the Chancellor of Transylvania. The story revolves around a sum of money lent to the town of Baia Mare by Anna Hátszegi, widow of János Sombori, who was captured by the Tatars in 1660. The woman then left this money to the Bethlen family in her last will. The story begins for Bethlen in the 1680s, the attempts to collect the debt can be traced in five years’ correspondence, written by Bethlen and his brothers, and also other dignitaries of Transylvania and the Kingdom of Hungary.

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András BÁNDI
Institution:
The Central Archive of the Evangelical Church A. C. in Sibiu, Romania
Email:
abandister@gmail.com
Abstract

The article presents the controversies between Hans Sachs von Harteneck and Chancellor Miklós Bethlen by taking into consideration the financial and representation issues of the Three Nations of Transylvania on the brink of the 18th century.

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Emilia-Mariana SOPORAN
Institution:
Lucian Blaga Central University Library, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
marisoporan@hotmail.com
Abstract

The present research represents the history of a volume of the old Romanian book Pearls of Wisdom, written by John Chrysostom, printed in Bucharest, in 1746. The volume studied is part of the patrimony owned by the Orthodox Theology Library, branch of the Lucian Blaga Central University Library, Cluj-Napoca. It also contains a short presentation of the editions published in Romania, establishing the contents of this editionby tracingthe homilies in the Chrysostom volumes of the Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Graecae, the standard edition of the patristic works. The transcription of the notes within the book represents a source of information on the religious and secular history of Oradea in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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Adriana STAN
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
adrstan@yahoo.ca
Abstract

The present paper intends to discuss the issue of an “internal” literary history and the debate upon this topic in post-war Romanian literary criticism. We shall analyse the methodological influence and solutions suggested by structuralism or stylistics in critics’ attempts, starting with the 1970s, to remap Romanian literary history in terms of larger typologies or genres. On the other hand, we shall discuss the features of the Romanian critical environment which trigger the synchronic approaches, and their re-evaluating consequences in the local literature.

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Corina CROITORU
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
corina.boldeanu@yahoo.com
Abstract

This paper sets out to retrieve and discuss a set of war poems by Romanian women poets, shaped around a pacifist strain that begins as a reaction to World War I, consolidates during World War II, and intensifies against the background of the communist propaganda in the second half of the fifth decade of the last century. The paper reviews war poems by women poets such as Carmen Sylva, Matilda Cugler-Poni, Maria Cunțan, Elena Văcărescu, Anișoara Odeanu, Magda Isanos, Maria Banuș, Veronica Porumbacu, and Nina Cassian.

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Rodica FRENŢIU
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
rfrentiu@hotmail.com
Abstract

The present study debates the way in which the Japanese author uniquely re-semanticises old Japanese aesthetic concepts such as mono no aware (‘the beauty of simple and transient things’) or yūgenbi (‘mysterious beauty’), by exploiting the valences of sight, in an interdisciplinary analysis where the poetic perspective and that of cultural semiotics is foremost. If touch, taste, smell and kinesthetic sense are senses centred on the body, which privilege direct, unmediated contact, it is acknowledged that hearing and seeing are senses that imply distance and perspective. Harnessing this characteristic of the optical, the Neo-Perceptionalist Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1970), in his novel House of the Sleeping Beauties (Nemureru bijo, 1961), transforms sight into a narrative technique that tries to re-sacralise the real world. A millennium after the The Tale of Genji, the first Japanese novel, signed by Murasaki Shikibu, in which the ideal of pure beauty was given by the faceless woman, reduced to long hair and 12 layered kimonos (junihitoe), the nude and sleeping female body in House of the Sleeping Beauties becomes the transient moment of pure beauty in what the Japanese woodblock print calls “the floating world” (ukiyo) or the infinite variety of an ephemeral world. In a house of pleasures where elderly clients either dream pleasantly or remember their youth during the nights they spend next to (drugged) sleeping maidens, old Eguchi, who delights in contemplating the sleeping beauties’ bodies, finding himself somewhere between mystery and voluptuous fantasy, gains “the last gaze”. Before fading away, it captures the image (imago) and the icon (eikon) of impermanent things, changing them into purity and beauty.

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Alex CIOROGAR
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
alex.ciorogar@gmail.com
Abstract

The present paper is committed to the topic of time and narrative. We will firstly draw a contextualizing outline, emphasizing the conditions which brought about the postmodern shift, followed by a cursory survey concerning the cultural aspects of postmodernism. In the second part of the paper, we will review some of the major works in the field of time and narrative. In the last part, we will finally investigate a postmodern British novel (Ian McEwan’s Atonement) by using structuralist and phenomenological instruments of analysis.

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Raluca Lucia CÎMPEAN
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
raluca.cimpean@gmail.com
Abstract

More than fifty years after his tragic death, John F. Kennedy continues to fascinate and incite the interest of a large public. The American Camelot endures, despite numerous and various revisionist historiography evaluations of JFK’s presidency and personal life. Conspiracy thinking underlies both the idealistic and the unflattering views of the Kennedy image and has proved to be a considerable factor in the proliferation of this cultural construct. However, very little has been written on the psychological, social and cultural mechanism which keeps the JFK flame burning. Don DeLillo is the only American novelist who transcends the mere sensationalist side of the Kennedy assassination toward a personal, yet historically informed, fictional analysis of November 22nd 1963 and its aftermath, in his 1988 novel Libra.

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Book reviews

Ionuţ COSTEA
Reviewed by
Florina ILIS
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
ilisf@hotmail.com
Abstract