De l’hésychasme politique et militant à la Renaissance : La dynamique roumaine du seuil culturel entre tradition, nouvelle sensibilité et histoire chez Neagoe Basarab
From Political and Militant Hesychasm to the Renaissance: The Romanian Dynamics of the Cultural Threshold Between Tradition, New Sensibility and History in Neagoe Basarab

Summary/Abstract: This study is the first in a series of three articles devoted to Neagoe Basarab. Using the tools of the hermeneutics of literary texts and sacred images, cultural studies and the history of sensibilities and emotions, these articles aim to define the cultural contribution of the voivode influenced by Hesychasm in the transition from the Middle Ages to the post-Byzantine Romanian Renaissance and Humanism.The study will first focus on the Romanian prince's work as a ctitor (founder, builder) and cultural patron at the beginning of the 16th century. It is followed by a second study devoted to his parenetic literary work, The Teachings of Neagoe Basarab to his son Theodosius - (‘Let us renew the inner man’. A model of social and cultural policy: The Hesychast Humanism, published in the Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies, vol. 8, no. 2 / 2025) and a third, which will analyse the voivode's iconography, in an attempt to identify the role of the spiritual doctrine of Hesychasm in these shifts in cultural paradigms. By focusing on Neagoe Basarab, the voivode of his country and therefore the representative who set the direction for his time, as well as on his work (political, literary and as a patron of the arts), we will attempt to analyse the elements that converge to configure a model of culture and sensibility for the Romanian space and its inhabitants at the end of the Middle Ages, and observe how the first stages of crossing the threshold towards a new cultural paradigm, that of Humanism and the Renaissance, are articulated. We will reactivate two concepts already used by specialists in the field - hesychast humanism and political hesychasm, and we will try to identify the relationship established between the two in order to see whether Byzantine (and especially post-Byzantine) hesychast humanism is, in reality, nothing other than the materialisation of militant hesychasm as a cultural policy. This hesychasm proposes in effect a society in which the value of the Human being as a perfect creation is first and foremost recovered and put back at the centre of a world where, concentrated on God and on himself to improve continually, he could participate in an ideal way in the life of the city by activating the virtues of contemplation (also incorporating the practice of continuous prayer) and discernment as essential and indispensable premises of (good) action. The latter is often sublimated precisely in its best form, ctitoria - architectural, cultural, literary construction.

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