OBSERVATIONS ON THE BOOKS OF CURSES ISSUED IN WALLACHIA (18TH CENTURY)
OBSERVATIONS ON THE BOOKS OF CURSES ISSUED IN WALLACHIA (18TH CENTURY)

Summary/Abstract: We intend to point out the circumstances that contributed to the transformation of books of curses into a juristic, evidence-giving act which played a decisive role on the practices of the princely Divan. To do this, we shall proceed to describe the genetic context that determined the appearance of books of curses. We shall consider, on the one hand, the political and social environment of the 18th century and on the other the general formulation pattern used in the princely and ecclesiastical courts, in order to find out to what extent the sanctio subdivision could be deemed as a matrix for books of curses. In order to describe the generic context of issuing books of curses, we have proposed to consider by comparison the normative juristic texts, both secular and clerical, that facilitated the imposition of these acts in the Romanian juristic practices. The functional context will be depicted through the corpus of texts we use, namely the books of curses kept in the National Archives in Bucharest and recorded in the Catalogue of the Metropolitan Church of Wallachia and of the Argeş Diocese respectively.

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