Începuturile receptării tipăriturilor în Transilvania. Studiu de caz: literatura omiletică latină publicată înainte de 1550
The Beginnings of the Transylvanian Reception of Printed Books. Case Study: The Latin Homiletic Literature Published before 1550

Summary/Abstract: The innovations brought by Johannes Gutenberg in the field of book production in the middle of the 15th century began to be used in Transylvania a few decades later, when the first printing workshop was established in Sibiu (1525). However, the people of Transylvania benefited from the new technology during this time span, as buyers, owners, donors and readers of the early printed books published in various European centres. The present paper discusses precisely the proportions and characteristics of this contemporary reception of the books published in the second half of the 15th century and the beginning of the following one, through a case study. The research of the Catholic sermon collections printed until 1550 with the aim of reconstructing the phenomenon of preaching in Late Medieval Transylvania led to a series of interesting remarks concerning the first contacts of the Transylvanian milieu with the products of movable type printing. Based on the repertory of the copies kept in twelve libraries and collections from Transylvania, the proposed paper intends to provide answers to questions such as: how soon did the first incunabula arrive in Transylvania? From which geographical areas/printing centres did they come? How substantial was their local presence and circulation before the middle of the 16th century? Who were the first owners? Without being considered as a representative sample for the reception of the typographic production of the mentioned period as a whole, the volumes with homiletic content capture suggestive sequences of this phenomenon. The identified copies of sermon collections highlight a quite dynamic pastoral and intellectual Transylvanian life, ready to absorb the most recent products of Western book culture. Traditional routes of commercial and cultural transactions connecting the easternmost province of the Hungarian Kingdom with Central and Western Europe facilitated access to early printed homiletic works, imported mainly from German typographic centres, but also from Italy. In what concerns the chronology of these imports, after a phase of concentrated acquisitions made in the years 1490-1510, followed a gradual decrease as a result of the saturation of the market. In the subsequent decades, the contacts of Transylvanian readers with the printed sermonaries were multiplied especially through the internal circulation of the volumes previously acquired.

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