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This article is trying to substantiate the validity of a single thesis: baroque metamorphoses ingeniously reveal a very optimistic outlook on death, rediviva in aethernum. Starting with Ovid, the forerunner of this continuous change, to Montaigne and Bergerac, in literature and art, the metamorphosis – an alter ego of the individual in an unstable era – is everywhere and it appears as a leitmotif. What about its status in French literature? Is there a literary connection between Ovid and Montaigne? Is Bergerac the chameleon of the French Baroque? Have the Gardens of the Palace of Versailles got a hidden meaning? These are only a few of the questions whose answer leads to the quintessence of Baroque metamorphosis.
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"The Seventh Seal" is not only a major cinematographic work, but also a major form of reception of the Middle Ages during the XXth Century. The central role played by the Death is an essential bounding between the XVth Century, obsessed with the war, the deasese and the beginning of the XXth Century, facing the same demons.
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For the longest time, perhaps because of its genre as polemic, Ar-radd ‘alā n-naṣārā (Rebuttal against Christians) has rarely been taken into consideration or taken seriously as a historical source, despite its potential relevance to history. However, the treatise is deemed, nowadays, as a primary source for understanding shifting Muslim sensibilities towards Christian ḏimmī social status in a period of official anti- Christian sentiment. The accuracy and intentions of Al-Ğāhiẓ’s writings have been drawn into question on numerous occasions, by both his contemporaries and by later historians, and Rebuttal is not an exception as the timing of its creation and the motivation behind it suggest a connection to Al-Mutawakkil’s anti-ḏimmī measures of 850. The purpose of this paper is to show how, in order to achieve his goal, Al-Ğāhiẓ actively tries to blur the lines between (various) ḏimmī and Byzantine Christians by simultaneously taking on doctrinal and social issues while perpetrating generalizations and decontextualizations. Structured as responses to a series of questions asked by some fellow Muslims and initially addressed by some Christians, al-Ğāhiẓ’s purpose was either to provide a genuine answer or to raise awareness over what was perceived as haughtiness from Christians, as ahlu ḏ-ḏimma, in the Abbasid society at that time. Ultimately, the goal of his criticism and rebuttal was the (re)enforcement of the law, either as a natural, next-logical-step measure, or as a calculated measure, enforcing the caliph’s agenda. Despite being, almost certainly, exaggerated for effect, Rebuttal nevertheless gives a unique insight into the mixed urban life of the period and contains relevant information about the social and legal conditions of Muslim-ḏimmī, especially Christian, relations in ‘Abbasid society.
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The medieval Muslim lives with a very vivid consciousness of the border that separates the world not only from a geographic point of view. The Muslim traveler crosses multiple frontiers within the Islamic world, discovering different spaces whose features create climates with varying degrees of alterity. The journey, as part of the average medieval Muslim’s education, gives today's reader a measure of the identity fragmentation that the Islamic world experiences in the medieval period. Travelers like Ibn Ğubayr and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa are engaged in a creative dynamic of identity trough the relation between peripheries and center, inevitably marked by borders. The border appears to us in the travel stories as an insurmountable point, but also a window to other spaces. The frontier is also an opportunity for a homo islamicus, untiringly in search and move, such as Ibn Baṭṭūṭa.
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This article presents the possibilities of using geographic information systems (GIS) by scientists analysing the process of shaping administrative borders. This still evolving and perfected technology used for introducing, collecting, processing and visualising spatial data provides the researchers with previously unattainable possibilities of data analysis. It is certainly a milestone in historical research on geographic and cultural environments as it carries many new perspectives which not only pertain to analysing spatial data, but also map-making. The examined or presented space ceases to be a “colour agreed upon” on paper, and becomes a precisely localised area that can be seen in the old and contemporary form in multiple shots. With such possibilities, history, this synonym of passing time, becomes a living picture.
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Gh. Jurgea-Negrilești, Troica amintirilor. Sub patru regi, ediția a III-a, Cartea Românească-Polirom, 2014, 480 p
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The article looks at the representatives of the Girs family who lived in China at the turn of the XX century as civil servants involved in the state affairs related to the Qing Empire or for family reasons, namely Russian Foreign Minister N. K. Girs (1820–1895), Russian Envoy to China M. N. Girs (1856–1932) and his wife M. N. Girs (Zamyatnina) (1860–1942). The study is aimed at analyzing the Girs family’s life stories and sources that most vividly illustrate China and Russian-Chinese relations at the turn of the XX century. The source base is comprised of archival materials and diaries of contemporaries. The applied hermeneutic method made it possible to interpret archival sources in more detail and supplement some well-known pages of Russian-Chinese relations. The study was spurred by the active interest of the Girses’ descendants in the family history, as well as the work of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation aimed at preserving the memory of outstanding diplomats who made a great contribution to the development of Russian-Chinese relations. Current intensification of ties between Russia and China encourages researchers to study the history of these bilateral relations, linking the present with the past. The author comes to the conclusion that once in China, the members of the Girs family conscientiously performed their duties. Moreover, M. N. Girs’s diary written during the Boxer Rebellion is a valuable source of the first-hand testimonies of those tragic events.
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The author deals with lists of voters in the area of Lika-Krbava County. The analysis covers the period of the electoral reform from May 1910, which significantly increased the number of citizens with the right to vote. Lika-Krbava County consisted of ten constituencies, including the towns of Senj and Karlobag on the Croatian Littoral and eight electoral districts in Lika. With regard to the property tax census, which was the basis of electoral law, it can be determined that this county was recognisable by the smallest number of voters in relation to other Croatian counties. In the introductory part of the text, data about the election results until the reform of 1910 is presented, with an emphasis on the elections of 1908, and the subjects that were discussed the most regarding the consequences of electoral geometry are highlighted. The numerical indicators of voters in Lika-Krbava County and their voter turnout are presented, and at the end, the results of parliamentary elections from October 1910 in that area are presented.
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The Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising of 1903 was an uprising of the Macedonian and Thracian Bulgarians in the European vilayets of the Ottoman Empire, supported by the free Bulgarians living in the Principality of Bulgaria. This fact, which is the shortest possible definition of the uprising, has been simultaneously and universally recognized– first of all, by the Ottoman authorities themselves, and together with them – by the jealous and hostile to the Bulgarian national cause Balkan neighbours, as well as by ‘big’ and ‘small’ countries, by international observers of different origins. The questioning of the Bulgarian character of the uprising started to gain momentum much later, with the blurring power of politics and geopolitics which intervened to create misconceptions. This way they turned over time until today into an artificially maintained problem in interstate relations. The Bulgarian Ilinden of 1903 and the revolutionary struggle in Macedonia and Adrianople Thrace in general prepared the Balkan War of 1912. The Macedonian-Adrianople liberation movement provided the Bulgarian national state with the historic chance to solve the all-Bulgarian question inherited from the Revival period: a task with which, unfortunately, the Bulgarian political elite failed to cope.
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Public opinion in Europe, consequently also in Great Britain, was worried about the news of the crimes committed by the Ottoman troops commanded by Hilmi Pasha against the population in the insurgent areas.Meanwhile, the sultan had promised amnesty for all the fled refugees as well as monetary aid for the returnees. On the other hand, the Bulgarian Committee (IMARO) was disappointed by the joint Austro-Hungarian and Russian position on the possibility of continuing direct Bulgarian(the Bulgarian negotiator was G. Natchevitch) – Ottoman talks, which in reality meant that the European Powers, including Tsarist Russia,were against the unlargment of Bulgaria within the borders from theTreaty of Saint Stephen (1878), which at that time had alarmed France and Great Britain. Consequently, the Ilinden uprising of 1903, in a way,marked the main turning point in European politics, with which the until then geographical notion “Macedonia” gradually begins to be associated,no longer with the majority population of Bulgarian origin and of big portion of the Albanians, but as territory inhabited by “Macedonian people”, which were steps toward the criation of new state and nation.
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The text analyzes how the 1903-uprising was presented in Bulgarian history textbooks under the communist regime. It invariably occupied half or a whole lesson in the textbooks dedicated to the History of Bulgaria throughout the entire period, most often in all three educational levels: in primary, intermediate and high school. From the very beginning, since 1946, the Bulgarian Communist Party, often by means of specially appointed textbook authors such as Tushe Vlahov, imposed a distorted Macedonianist view of the uprising, presenting it as the outcome achieved by a putative Macedonian nation, and not by the Bulgarian nation. In a more moderate form, this version persisted in the 1950s and in the first half of the 1960s. The Bulgarian character of IMARO and the Uprising began to stand out more clearly after the second half of the 1960s, especially in the high school. During the entire period up to the beginning of the 1980s, textbooks followed the regime’s ideological patterns and the so-called ‘class-party approach’, according to which some malicious conquering role of the Bulgarian bourgeoisie, Prince Ferdinand and the Bulgarian governments was to be highlighted, which was opposed to the democratic and republican spirit of the Macedonian revolutionary movement, strongly influenced by socialism. Only at the beginning of the 1980s, a new high-school textbook was introduced, which was freed from these ideological patterns and was largely in line with scientific discoveries and theses of Bulgarian history science, which adopted part of the achievements of pre-war Bulgarian historiography on Macedonian topics. In the 1950s and 1960s, textbooks presented two separate uprisings with different names: the Ilinden Uprising in Macedonia and the Preobrazhenie Uprising in Eastern Thrace, and in 1969 – 1981 they coalesced in one single uprising styled ‘Ilinden-Preobrazhenie’. After 1981 – 1982, textbooks adopted the traditional name of this uprising, used before the Second World War and especially before 1934: the Ilinden Uprising.
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The multiperspective in history launched by Skopje is an attempt to defend the politically operative historical mythology created during the Cold War era. The so-called Macedonian historiography is essentially a Yugoslav reading of the history of Macedonia, and today it continues to be inextricably linked to the historiographical processes in Belgrade and the post-Yugoslav space. The aspiration of the historical elite near the Vardar to achieve recognition of two equal narratives – Bulgarian and Macedonian – diverges from scientific principles and turns science into prosaic propaganda. Historical documents unequivocally testify that in the strategic plans of the Bulgarian state, the revolutionary organization in Macedonia occupied an important place almost ten years before its actual emergence. In this sense, the study of the relationship between IMARO, the Exarchate and the Bulgarian state leads us to the problem of borders and the interaction between them. At first glance, the three institutions are clearly defined, occupy certain historical levels and have a clear personal identification. In reality, all three historical factors operate in doctrinal and political unity.
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Undoubtedly, the research conducted by the British historian and writer Mercia MacDermott, among which the pivotal biographies of the Bulgarian revolutionaries Vasil Levski, Gotse Delchev and Yane Sandanski, has contributed to Bulgarian history scholarship, but more importantly, they popularized some important moments of our past among the British and Western European public. The strong emotional impulse with which the British researcher began to write each of her works did not exclude, but rather complemented her serious and meticulous research approach. Her particular interest in the liberation revolutionary movement of the Bulgarians in Macedonia grew for her into a cause that she followed until the end of her life.
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The Romania–Bulgaria relations were assigned the role of satellites belonging first to the Axis, and then to the U.S.S.R., following the regulation of the territorial statute of Southern Dobruja on 7 September 1940 through the Treaty of Craiova. After the Red Army entered Bulgaria, on 8 September 1944, an unusual fact intervened between Bucharest and Sofia from the perspective of Kremlin’s influence, of course: the priority of Bulgarian political, ideological and diplomatic factors over the Romanian ones, unprecedented in the history of almost seven decades of the modern bilateral relations. The lack of human and ideological resources of the Romanian Communist Party became obvious during the competition with the Bulgarian Communists and their leader, Georgi Dimitrov, which was not even declared. Communist Bulgaria became a model that Romanian communists did not seriously take into account. At least in the year when King Mihai I abdicated (1947), they were zestfully studying and copying this model, as the case may have been. Being a so-called People’s Republic even since September 1946, following a falsified popular referendum, Bulgaria undertook to coordinate plans of internal and external politics of Romania during the next months. In order to finalize a “Bulgarian way” in Romania, the government led by Petru Groza and the media of propaganda (mainly Scînteia, the press official of the Romanian Communist Party), scrupulously assumed the role of protagonists. Just like the U.S.S.R., for more than two years (1946 – February 1948), Communist Bulgaria became an extremely important and valuable topic of the Romanian public speech, of the Romanian Communists’ confirmation, of establishing the project for instituting the totalitarian regime. The similarity of actions and of the institutes’ organization was striking for this short period, and the treaty signed in January 1948 was nothing but the end of a period extremely abundant in models and suggestions for Romanian communists.
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The current paper presents the work-in-progress catalogue of old Hungarian books belonging to ‘Lucian Blaga’ Central University Library of Cluj-Napoca (BCU Cluj): of this ongoing work, I present here the catalogue of the books printed between 1484-1630. The material is, therefore, organized chronologically, following the principles established in the first retrospective bibliography of old Hungarian books by Károly Szabó, the first librarian of the University Library in Cluj and of the Transylvanian Museum Society, whose (old) book collections are currently preserved at BCU Cluj, while for the copy-specific descriptions I formulated myself a set of criteria. From the scrutinized time span I counted 418 titles in 504 volumes, a number which comprises the duplicates, but does not include all fragments of books – many of them still unidentified – that will be inserted in the catalogue after the processing of the entire collection of old Hungarian books. During the cataloguing process, I attached particular importance to provenance research. Beside the institutional provenance (Library of the Transylvanian Museum Society – University Library of Cluj), this also comprises previous book owners, since I consider that book history is inseparably connected to the history of their use, which can be uncovered only by identifying the former possessors. Such details bring significant contributions to intellectual history, revealing intellectual networks active in Transylvania between the 16th and the 19th centuries.
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In this note we publish a short letter from Leonhard Euler’s son, Johann Albrecht Euler, the Secretary of the Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg, to Marcin Poczobutt-Odlanicki, the Vilnius astronomer. The fate of this letter seemed unknown, but we know its content now. The main news in this correspondence was the discovery of a comet by the astronomer Anders Johan Lexell.
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This paper aims at exploring the discursive strategies used by the central press during the third Liberal Party government led by Gh. Tătărescu (29 August 1936 – 14 November 1937), so as to make naturalizations after 1918 a matter under debate and their revision a necessary solution. The revision of citizenship was already on the agenda of the far-right parties (the National-Christian Defense League, turned into the National-Christian Party, and the “Archangel Michael” Legion) since their foundation, but it was only during the tenure of this government that the topic made its way into the central press. That happened under certain specific conditions. First of all, there was the topic of foreigners and the revival of the National-Christian slogan “Romania for the Romanians” (in the original: „România a românilor“). Secondly, press reports referred to presumed cases of fraudulent reception of citizenship by foreigners (especially Jews) and, more precisely, there was a press scandal caused by the so-called Marton Hertz case. These discursive strategies were successful, because they were followed by three normative revision initiatives. As the analysis of these initiatives, in terms of their legal content and the parliamentary and press debates that accompanied them, is complex and beyond the scope of this paper, we shall only sketch them. Starting from historical sources (the press articles of the time, the archives of the Legislative Council, the parliamentary debates), the study aims at exploring the previously unknown prehistory of Decree-Law No 169 of 21 January 1938 on the revision of citizenship in terms of the mechanisms that made it possible and prepared the public opinion, in 1938-1939, for the acceptance and effective implementation of the revision of citizenship.
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The article provides an outline of the development of the internal relations and divisions in the Slovenian progressive (liberal) camp in the years just before the Second World War and upon its start. After falling from power in 1935, the progressive camp was weak and internally fragmented. At the same time, the range of groups and ideological orientations found under the “progressive” umbrella was extremely wide as it extended far to the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The youth, in particular, were distinctly ideologically differentiated and radicalised. Some of them were highly susceptible to radical political approaches and moved towards fascism and communism. Especially when viewing the wider ideological camp, it is thus partly justified to posit a process of disintegration. At the same time, at least the core part maintained a consciousness of belonging to a common political camp, which was reflected by renewed connections between parties and groups on the eve of the war.
More...pojam kurtoazne ljubavi u poznom srednjem veku
Cette recherche a pour but de présenter la culture courtoise du Bas Moyen Âge en utilisant des mots-clés tels la notion de la dame, la poésie des troubadours, ainsi que l’importance des chevaliers et des femmes aristocratiques pour la création de cet environnement complexe. En premier lieu, il était néccesaire de définir le concept de l’amour courtois dans le contexte historique de la période du 12e jusqu’au 15e siècle. Pour ce faire, il a été essentiel d’examiner son origine, laquelle découle de divers événements tels les Croisades et le culte de la Vierge. En outre, il convient de souligner le rôle primordial de l’amour courtois dans le développement de la littérature française et de la culture européenne en général, grâce à la poésie de troubadours. La question centrale était comment expliquer l’émergence de l’amour courtois et ces implications dans la réalité quotidienne, surtout dans le domaine de la cour où ces idées exerçaient une influence considérable. Étant donné que les recherches moderns ont déployé des efforts à éclairer la position des femmes dans divers contextes sociaux, cette étude s’inscrit dans ces mêmes orientations. En cherchant à différencier la vie réelle de l’idéal imaginaire propre à la culture de l’amour courtois, notre objectif est d’attirer l’attention à la vie quotidienne des femmes pendant une période où leur voix n’a pas été entendue.
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