Church and society fasting and abstinence for Romanian clergy in the 18th century
Church and society fasting and abstinence for Romanian clergy in the 18th century

Summary/Abstract: The present study analyses the way in which the Romanians and their Church related themselves to tradition, to the so-called “ancestral law”, in the 18th century, a time of defining their own church and confession. It comprises a research about their religious fast, the most visible part of their practical religious life. Abstinence, restraint, and fasting were norms exclusively promoted by Church, an entity that used and even exploited the coefficient of symbol of food. Taking into account the relation between Church and State in the Habsburg Empire and the political context provided by the Theresian and Jopeshinian reforms, the present study retraces what and how Transylvanian Romanians ate according to three types of sources: 1) archive documents; 2) narrative documents belonging to those who were directly involved and subjected to the rules of the monastic life. 3) the rules controlled by Church. They were recorded in: a) Union acts; b) catechisms of the age; c) the calendar that adjusted their daily life, and established the alternation of feasts and fasts. It is therefore emphasized the close connection between Church and Society in a moment when the reference to the rigour of fast became a dissociating element between uniates and non-uniates for the Transylvanian Romanians in Transylvania.

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