O dimensiune puţin explorată a vieţii monahale moldoveneşti în Evul Mediu: producţia şi schimbul de bunuri
A less explored dimension of Moldavian monastic life in the Middle Ages: production and exchange of goods

Summary/Abstract: In Romanian historiography, the issue of monasteries estates has been analyzed quantitatively. The same perspective has been also used by works on legal and fiscal privileges that were given to various cult places along time. Most of these contributions revealed, in a static and descriptive manner, the progressive accumulation of goods and privileges by Moldavian monasteries. In recent decades another direction of research appeared, focused on the effort to highlight that great monasteries, particularly those destined to become princely necropolis, had a key role in legitimizing the princely power. The approach we propose here aims to reveal concretely how rural communities gathered their harvest from monastic estates and what other benefits they had. Thus various aspects of daily life in a monastic environment can be reconstructed, opening new directions for analyzing the complex nature of the relationship between church and princely power. The main benefits of such a research reside in the fact that they produce a refocusing of attention on how daily activities of a large monastic community were performed. In fact, besides the estates and privileges analyzed by historians, the community life was more complex, and it implied thorough organization of production and trade.

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