One of the longest prevailing building types in history were library buildings. The need for such buildings emerged in parallel with the appearance of writing, when the emission of various documents raised the problem of their preservation, storage, and accessibility. This need occasioned the construction of particular sites for this purpose, which have extended and changed in time until they reached the sophisticated and functional structures built today.
Scholars of the history of literature and printing in the 16th century agree that the most prolific printing press of 16th century Hungary was the Heltai-Hoffgreff print in Cluj (Kolozsvár, Klausenburg, present-day Romania). After Gáspár Heltai’s death in 1574, his widow took over the print, becoming the only effective woman publisher of the 16th century in Hungary. Her presence as the owner of the Heltai print is attested by 47 publications between 1575 and 1582 (the year of her death). This period of eight years of the Heltai print is very laconically reflected in the scholarship. The generally accepted view is that Mrs Heltai was a talented businesswoman, who continued to publish the profitable penny-books, in even larger number than previously her husband. This paper argues that Mrs Heltai developed a publishing policy of her own, different from her husband’s, and investigates two aspects of this argument. On the one hand, it traces Mrs Heltai’s financial interest in her enterprise as a business woman, ensured by the publication of a very popular secular genre of early modern Hungarian literature, the history in verse. On the other hand, it sketches the importance of women’s particular education and literary preferences in an attempt to suggest the possible gendered nature of Mrs Heltai’s printing policy.
Romanian culture in the 1930s witnessed an authentic cultural spectacle centred on books. The Day of the Book, which was later to become the Week of the Book, and during the royal dictatorship (10 February 1938 – 6 September 1940) the Month of the Book, was a nation-wide event, creating a favourable social context for readings and books to find their place in the centre of public discussion. The event that channelled all these discussions is presented chronologically in the first part of the paper: its origin and evolution from a simple book exhibition to a veritable national festival, encompassing large cities such as Bucharest, Cluj, or Oradea, and minor ones as well, like Baia Mare or Satu Mare. The second part of the research presents the position of the state in the festival of the book. It identifies and exposes the official discourse and message that state representatives transmitted on this occasion. It was a policy which had more to do with ideological propaganda, and aimed at creating a certain type of citizen. Next I will expose the economic-commercial discourse of publishers and booksellers, and of all those who profit from book trade. The article will try to establish how far the various printing house policies are interrelated with the cultural directives of the political sphere. The relationship of publishers and authors, publishers and book distributors will also be followed, as well as their marketing strategies. Finally, the discourse of the civil society involved in raising the cultural standard of the population will also be analyzed, including the discourse of intellectuals, literary critics, authors, as well as interviews with individuals, found in the press of the age.
The author of this paper utterly agrees with Montaigne’s and his followers’ criticism of pedantry and specialized erudition. Consequently, the followings offer a personal reading of Naudé’s treatise on the library. Gabriel Naudé was the first to lay the theoretical basis of the public library. The author of the treatise Advice on Establishing a Library was himself an incarnation of cosmopolitism by his implication in the debates of his time and his relationship to various European centres of power. He was a courtier, an agile political counsellor, pleasing in conversation, and holder of a much exercised sense of judgment. The library is an aspect of the formation of his personality. His interest in such an institution illustrates a new type of social contractarianism, imposed by absolute power: urban eloquence as opposed to medieval heroism. At the same time, this interest also addresses the technological shock provoked by the dissemination of printing. This paper offers a presentation and discussion of Gabriel Naudé’s perception on the library in a close textual approach. The practical issues of acquisitions and organization of book collections are treated with a spirit of intellectual opening deriving from scepticism, and of respect for the great intellectual figures of Antiquity and Modernity.
The paper undertakes to analyze the philological problems and to recreate the literary historical context of a Hungarian satire translation published in 1786, a copy of which is today kept in the Special Collections Department of the Lucian Blaga Central University Library Cluj. It narrates and completes with new data the history of this rare book, preserved nowadays only in a few copies, focusing on the circumstances of its publication, its author, genre, structure, and reception.
The study of some unpublished documents – letters, official addresses, drawings and sketches dated 1884–1910 – from the personal archive of professor Antal Koch, geologist and founder of the Cluj university school, reveals his professionalism in approaching scientific research, adding details about his relationship with contemporary personalities. These inedited documents have recently been found in the Paleontology-Stratigraphy Museum’s archive at the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj.
Selling at Cochii vechi was used for granting some princely incomes on lease, and mezat (auction) for transferring unmoveable goods. The procedure was coordinated by the Princely Council, simultaneous verbal advertisements were made in the locality where the goods put up for sale were to be found, to the sub-prefects, and in the Council. When selling at mezat the priority right was respected. In order to maintain the control over the circulation of lands and buildings and to avoid illegal alienations, the Sobornicescul hrisov of the year 1785 introduced a stage of preliminary verification of this right, the so called “advertisement”. The transaction was concluded in the Princely Council, by hareci, that is the auction itself and the awarding of the goods with the parties’ consent, after which the Prince confirmed the new proprietor’s ownership.
Bessarabia, part of the tsarist empire (after the seizure of the territory in 1812), was pushed gradually towards a forced assimilation/integration to Russia’s social-political life. The immediate impact of the annexation was marked by the social-political and ecclesiastical crisis of the 19th century’s first three decades: migrations of the population, plague and cholera epidemics, shortages and poverty. The phenomenon was later compared to “la Grande Peur” of 1789 during the French Revolution because the local population’s fear from the sudden changes were as great as in France. The later development of the province was a tormenting process of adaptation by which the Bessarabian Romanian society tried to conform to the conditions of the foreign social, political, cultural, and ecclesiastical environment of the empire. Political division was followed arbitrarily by an administrative-religious rupture by the creation of a new eparchy in the annexed territory – the Eparchy of Chişinǎu and Hotin, subordinated canonically/anti-canonically to a foreign Church. Metropolitan Gavriil Bănulescu-Bodoni (1813–1821) who led the newly created eparchy in the annexed territory had to look for a compromise to reconcile the Russian political and ecclesiastical domination with the spiritual life of the Bessarabian people. The scholarly activity of the Metropolitan Gavriil Bănulescu-Bodoni was situated “between tradition and the tsarist policy”. Against the background of these phenomena of social and political crisis in the new province incorporated into the Russian Empire, the Bessarabian Branch of the Bible Society was initiated in 1817. The Bessarabian Branch of the Russian Bible Society was created and the distribution of the books of the Holy Scripture with missionary aims was made in accordance with a model directed by the Bible Committee of Saint Petersburg, which means that it followed a structure identical with the central one which, in turn, functioned according to a foreign model (the British and Foreign Bible Society).
The turning away from theoretical comportment and the concurrent attempt to gain new access to life as it is being pre-theoretically enacted and lived – the effort to go back to original experience and to find a conceptuality adequate to it – are parallel developments in German philosophy and theology at the turn of the 19thand 20th century. In his effort to find a hermeneutic return to “life”, for the young Heidegger – as is shown by his lectures on the phenomenology of religion – primal Christianity appeared as a fundamental paradigm. / It was by the hermeneutic transformation of Husserlian phenomenology that Heidegger attempted to make life accessible – life as it was experienced in primal Christianity and had been described in The Epistles of Paul. From this perspective, the religious-theological relevance of the interrelated structure of “Erlebnis”, “experience”, and “understanding” originates from the hermeneutic-phenomenological thematization and unravelling of the believing comportment, of how the believer enacts his/her faith. The paper undertakes the attempt to reconstruct the young Heidegger’s path of thinking with an eye to some major themes of the phenomenology of religion course, with special regard to the kairological conception of time elaborated in it.
The purpose of the following study is to delimit some of the interpretations of the book of Job. I believe that the exposition of several perspectives does not solve the issue of the righteous' sufferance, but it opens an ampler possibility of perceiving a fundamental issue of humankind and at the same time leads to understanding that no answer is absolute, unless as seen filtered through a certain way of thinking, but every answer expresses nonetheless a definitive belief for the interpreter’s conscience. The idea which coordinates the work is that the data of the historian, of the theologian, of the philosopher, of the man of letters, must not be analyzed separately, but rather all together, this being the only way that the issues questioned by the biblical work can diminish.
Starting from the problematization of the meanings of science and library professions and institutions, the paper surfaces and analyzes from perspectives equally philosophical, epistemological, and scientometric, the premises and conditions which situate – willingly or not – the project of a (any) genuine research which intends to study the Romanian literature on librarianship as it appears in books and periodicals. To this end, earlier researches will also be placed on the dissection table of analysis, but meanwhile the problematic and even symptomatic experiences that the editors of the journal Philobiblon and its Romanian anthologies by the title Hermeneutica Bibliothecaria – Antologie Philobiblon have to confront are also organically exposed. These experiences outline as well the issues that practically any present or future responsible research of this type should focus on, as also the neuralgic points and mental traps which – once identified – will have to be either avoided, or assumed in the course of these researches. These traps, resulting precisely from the functioning and environment of this literature – which is, or pretends to be, equally professional and scientific – are and can be dangerous in the future, yet also eloquent with regard to their publishing and affiliation institutions.
[*] Project co-financed by the SECTORAL OPERATIONAL PROGRAM FOR HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT 2007 – 2013 Priority Axis 1. "Education and training in support for growth and development of a knowledge based society" Key area of intervention 1.5: Doctoral and post-doctoral programs in support of research. Contract nr.: POSDRU/88/1.5/S/60185 – “Innovative doctoral studies in a Knowledge Based Society”Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
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