Volume XXIV (2019), no. 2

Despite France's low interest in the Romanian people, the ties between the two peoples expanded in the first half of the 19th century. Before that, the consular activity was limited to unimportant reports, which targeted different abuses of the administration, without reference to the political conditions of Moldova and Wallachia. After 1830 and especially after the Treaty of Adrianople, when Turkish control over trade on the Danube is removed, France and the other European states begin to show a greater interest towards the Principalities of Moldova and Wallachia. The crisis of the Ottoman Empire increased this interest of France.
Although the French were not interested in the problems of the Principalities, in the mid-nineteenth century, an image of Moldova and Wallachia began to emerge in France. This image was especially drawn in the diplomatic and scientific circles due to the great influx of information regarding the Romanians.

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During the period of high-Stalinism until the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the increasingly tyrannical public policy completely subdued the operation of intellectual areas. Publishing can be conceived of as a tentacle of the literary policies of the period, the principal place where state-control could be exerted.
My paper provides a picture of the inescapable paths for a publisher in this era through the analysis of samples from the operation of a state-owned publishing enterprise: the Literary Fiction Publishers’ and illustrate how József Révai executed ideological control at many phases of the publishing process.

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If we leave aside the contrastive method, often used in the process of teaching foreign languages, lingua franca (or the contact language) is replaced in the act of teaching Romanian language as a foreign language (henceforth called RLS  ̶  Româna ca limbă străină) by a recognizable mixture of clichés, seen as a class of socio-cultural and linguistic codes. The existence of endless resources of signification hidden in every cliché gives us the opportunity to reflect on the role played by clichés in acquiring new vocabulary at a basic level of RLS. Under what circumstances can they be used? What are the advantages/disadvantages? How beneficial would be the use of clichés as a mediator in teaching RLS?

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Idiomatic expressions contain elements of human essence, in the form of cultural markers, aspects of tradition, remembrances of the past, collective mentalities, cognitive patterns and figurative thinking. The investigation of idioms from different languages can highlight resemblances and contrast between people and cultures. Given that the nature of idioms is mainly metaphoric, it is interesting to analyze how language users decode their figurative meaning, particularly how non-native speakers interpret the metaphorical significance of idioms from foreign languages. This experiment focuses on the mechanisms of metaphorical thinking, emphasizing the role of accessing symbolic and conceptual knowledge or interpreting references in the use and understanding of idiomatic expressions.

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The present study proposes to bring into attention the expansion of the Order of the Friars Minor in the Kingdom of Hungary and in Transylvania, in particular. The spread is of great significance because was one of the first things that the friars undertake after the approval of the Order. Thus, on the one hand, this contributed to convert a large number of persons, and on the other hand, it served the interests of the crowned heads and nobles. Based upon two types of sources (archives and minorite literature) the present research tries to answer a couple of questions, such as: ”How did the Order arrive into the Kingdom of Hungary?” or ”Which information is still available regarding the Province?”.

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The present paper focuses on the interconnected relationship between higher education, ecclesiastical career and local learning in the area inhabited by the Transylvanian Saxons during the “long 15th century”. This discussion revolves around the phenomenon of book accumulation that can be linked to the priests and the parish church of Cisnădie/Heltau, a small settlement with urban aspirations in southern Transylvania. The clergy of Cisnădie’s Saint Walpurgis parish church took advantage of the availability of university education in Central European institutions founded in the second half of the 14th century (Prague, Vienna and Cracow), and brought back from their academic sojourns the texts needed for the daily functioning of the parish: sermon collections, canonical treatises, manuals on pastoral ministry. By producing in turn local writings, the literate clergymen used such books as vehicles of both instruction and transfer of knowledge, as well as for an improved pastoral care.

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From the first half of 20th century to the present day, the Romanian historiography present that Nicolae Pătrașcu, the son of  Michael the Brave, enrolled to Jesuit College at Cluj. In the present study I propose to research this subject, trying to answer some questions: did the son of Michael the Brave truly attend the school in Cluj and if he did, when? What are the sources that relate to such a possibility and do they fully support the hypothesis? When were the sources issued? When did Nicolae Pătrașcu come to Cluj?

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