The semantic nature of the religious text: Dosoftei, viaţa şi petreacerea svinţilor (Lives of the saints), Iași, 1682-1686
The semantic nature of the religious text: Dosoftei, viaţa şi petreacerea svinţilor (Lives of the saints), Iași, 1682-1686

Summary/Abstract: This study aims to analyse a hagiographic text from the seventeenth century, written in the Romanian language but in Cyrillic script, from the perspective of the current exploratory state in textual semantics, the hermeneutics and semiotics of culture, attempting to “decipher” the cultural code and the discursive universe peculiar to that age. Due to the permanent dynamics of the reception horizon, “old” works are facing the danger of losing their significance as a result of the “closure” of the text within a particular symbolic universe. What is necessary, therefore, is a “cultural dialogue,” in which memory should amount to a creative and constructive process, and the traditional historical vein should undergo a “literary reinterpretation.” The cultural function of the printed work bearing the title Viaţa şi petreacerea svinţilor (Lives of the Saints), published in Jassy by Metropolitan Dosoftei, may be examined in light of the functional-typological categories of cultural texts, as proposed in Eastern European semiotics, and may be identified as a textual type that outlines a “semantic” world model, which generates a symbolic-mythical sense.

• Details
• Contents