Blestemul în societatea românească premodernă– o formulă juridică sau o expresie literară a comunicării convingerilor religioase în raport cu ceilalţi
The Curse in the Pre-modern Romanian Society – a Juridical Formula or a Literary Expression for the Communication of the Religious Beliefs in Relation

Summary/Abstract: This study analyses the existing anathema formulas from the old literature and juridical texts from the Romanian Countries. Fundamental in facts, if the “juridical anathema” had no mystical connotation, yet, it was one of the laic and ecclesiastic efforts in order to maintain the Divinity guaranteed order, and to ensure personal will. Therefore, administratively, it was a form of judged thing authority and a form of testamentary authority. Socially and moral-religiously, anathema was a method of exclusion, as also a form of payment and correction for a harm done, a method in order to discourage any “abnormality”. For the Romanian people of that time, it was not immoral, unchristian the gesture of invoking the Divinity for a punitive purpose or to demonstrate the validity of the social rules. Associated to the judgment, the Divine sanction, religious rogation and magic, the anathema denounces, in the same measure, the religious sensibility of that whole period, but also societies’ authority relations, the preoccupation concerning conserving the relation to the past and ensuring the future (within the family and within the community). “The testimonials” of that period, although not specialized, offer to the nowadays observer, enough proofs in order to look at the anathema beyond its witchcraft connotation.

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