Concepția asupra „blagorodiei” în Vechiul Regim
The Concept of „Blagorodia” in the Romanian Ancien Régime

Summary/Abstract: The article aims for a semantic archaeology of the word blagorodia (to be of noble birth) in the 17th and 18th centuries Romanian texts. The author explores an array of literary sources that includes chronicles, juridical, encomiastic and parenetic texts, epitaphs and the so-called “books for delight”. The word is documented for the first time in 1652 in Îndreptarea legii and refers to a moral attribute, opposing the nobility of birth to the nobility of deed. Taken from the Byzantine parenetic texts and transposed in Romanian, blagorodia soon also acquired a theological and axiological meaning. The chapter on the signs of blagorodia from the florilegium Floarea darurilor, based on the treaty Summa virtutum et vitiorum by Guglielmo Peraldo, is especially relevant for the reinterpretation of the concept as an outcome of exercising one’s virtue. Thus, throughout the 18th century, two opposing views on blagorodia were being used. In this literary clash, the parenetic literature and the florilegia underlined the nobility of virtue, while the panegyrics, the encomiastic texts and the epitaphs emphasised the nobility of birth. The two opposing meanings were sometimes harmonized, as in Sevastos Kiminytes’s panegyric for Constantin Brâncoveanu. The last part of the article explores how the concept of blagorodia was rhetorically used and abused in chroniclers and genealogies.

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