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Storia religiosa della spazio romeno, I and II/4. La Chiesa Romena nel contest transilvano. Edited by Luciano Vaccaaro (directed by Cesare Alzati). (Europa ricerche, 20.) Pp. 374; 375–795 incl. 1 table, 9 ills and 10 maps. Milano: Centro Ambrosiano, 2016. €56 (paper.) 978 88 6894 150 5

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Storia religiosa della spazio romeno, I and II/4. La Chiesa Romena nel contest transilvano. Edited by Luciano Vaccaaro (directed by Cesare Alzati). (Europa ricerche, 20.) Pp. 374; 375–795 incl. 1 table, 9 ills and 10 maps. Milano: Centro Ambrosiano, 2016. €56 (paper.) 978 88 6894 150 5

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2018

Diego Lucci*
Affiliation:
American University in Bulgaria
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Abstract

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Reviews
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

This two-volume collection of essays in Italian by a group of Italian and Romanian scholars on the religious history of the ‘Romanian space’ – by which is meant the historical regions of Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania – originates in two conferences held in Italy in 2002. As Cesare Alzati notes in his introductory essay, and as the chapters of this book show, the ‘Romanian space’ provides an emblematic example of the religious history of Europe and of its complexity. The Romanian lands have been on the border between Eastern and Western Europe, or, in other words, between Orthodox and Latin Christianity, since the Christianisation of the Danube-Carpathian region in the early Middle Ages. Later, the dialectic between the voivodeships of Moldavia and Wallachia, the Orthodox Churches of these two principalities and the Ottoman Empire led the political leaders of Moldavia and Wallachia to support, and closely cooperate with, their Orthodox Churches while generally protecting religious minorities. On the other hand, multi-ethnic Transylvania became, in the early modern era, a principality inhabited mainly by Protestants of different denominations – i.e. Saxon Lutherans, Hungarian Calvinists and Szekely anti-Trinitarians. At that time, as various essays in this collection point out, the different political and religious institutions of the Romanian lands frequently interacted with the Catholic Church, to the extent that the Ruthenian Church achieved union with Rome in 1595–6 and the Romanian Church of Transylvania entered into full communion with the Holy See in the period between 1697 and 1701, following the Habsburg conquest of Transylvania. Moreover, other minorities, including Jews, gradually settled in the Romanian lands. Several essays in this collection argue that, although the Orthodox element played an important role in the making of Romanian cultural identity, especially after the union of Moldavia and Wallachia in the mid-nineteenth century, the different religious groups of the ‘Romanian space’ coexisted relatively peacefully until the advent of the Communist regime. The last section of this book explains the issues that the Romanian Orthodox Church and other Christian denominations experienced in the Communist period, up until the revival of Christianity in Romania, in its different forms and expressions, after the fall of the Communist regime. Briefly, this comprehensive collection of essays offers a thorough and detailed account of the religious and ecclesiastical history of the Romanian lands from the early Middle Ages to the present. Far from concentrating only on Orthodox Christianity, this book pays due attention to the contributions of various religious confessions and organisations to Romanian history. For all these reasons, this book deserves careful reading by anyone interested in the history of the ‘Romanian space’ and in the religious history of south-eastern Europe.