Oportunităţi culturale la început de secol XIX. Gheorghe Şincai şi contactul cu iluminismul maghiar (1803-1808)
Cultural Opportunities at the Beginning of the 19th Century. Gheorghe Şincai and the Contacts with the Hungarian Enlightenment (1803-1808)

Summary/Abstract: With the help of the most recent literature in the field, the paper proposes to provide an updated perspective on Gheorghe Şincai’s evolution as a historian. A distinction can be made between three stages of cultural and intellectual development in Şincai’s life, each made possible by the encounters with different scholarly environments he had in Rome, Vienna, Blaj and, towards the end of his life, in Buda. During the time he spent in Buda (1803-1808), Şincai wrote his most important works, which were to become well known among the scholars of the period. The intellectual milieu provided by the University’s Printing Press at the beginning of the 19th century gave Şincai the chance to work among the most important scholars of the time and feel the influence of the approaching Romantic movement. The cultural environment in Buda, with the many opportunities it offered to Şincai, brought about the remarkable completion of his historical work. Here Şincai improves his method and the manner of organization and presentation of historical data, but his conception about history still remains the one he developed during his early stay in Rome. The time Şincai spends in Hungary’s capital brings sheds a different light on the clerk and the historian. If leaving the typography can be regarded as a failure for Şincai the clerk, Şincai the historian benefited from it and managed to finalize his historical work in the form we knew today.

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