Alteritate şi identitate religioasă. Consideraţii cu privire la reprezentarea „ereticului” în literatura tipărită în Moldova la mijlocul secolului al XVII-lea (I)
Religious Identity and Otherness. Considerations Regarding the Representation of the „Heretic” in the Moldavian Printed Works at the Middle of the XVIIth Century

Summary/Abstract: Analysing the content of the printed works in Moldavia at the middle of the XVIIth century the present paper intends to approach the category „heretic” as a main instrument used in order to better understand the transformations known by the Moldavian ecclesiastical élite at the level of religious imagination, cultural and ecclesiastical politics and the process of religious identity construction. The polemical context resulted of the synodal activity at Iaşi in 1642 and the printed works edited the following years are used in order to reconstruct a social typology and to reflect on the way this ecclesiastical élite thought and represented the religious otherness, the politics elaborated at this moment, taking into consideration the fact that any attempt to reconstruct the evolution of a mental representation implies social and temporal contextualising and the significance attributed to it is mobile. It also intends to define the opportunities instrumented by this type of religious propaganda to strengthen the Orthodox Eastern identity and the social control at the lower levels of ecclesiastical social structures revealing a religious discourse on the social relations and realities much more polemic, based on exclusion and marginalization, and the ecclesiastical élite’s awareness of the necessity to improve the level of the religious knowledge through explanation, analogies and the efficacity of the sermons’ content required. Identified with the confessions resulted after the Reformation movement, but also with the Armenian communities existing here, the reconstruction of the „heretic” social type reflects an important effort sustained by these social categories intended to improve the sense of religious self-consciousness. On the other hand, edited sources used to reflect this discourse reveal an important change regarding the process of cultural and religious communication, being percieved as such and instrumented as a vehicle in the process of transmitting information. They also represent important evidence for the patterns developed by the Romanian communities as far as religous identity is concerned during the following centuries.

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