Sorin NEMETI (Universitatea „Babeș-Bolyai” din Cluj-Napoca)
„ȘCOALA ARDELEANĂ” ȘI ISTORIA PROVINCIEI DACIA
Keywords: Transylvanian School, Roman Dacia, historiography, Latin origin, polemic.
Abstract: „Transylvanian School” and the History of the Province of Dacia. By the syntagm “Transylvanian School” we refer to the historians of the Transylvanian Enlightenment, Samuil Micu, Gheorghe Șincai and Petru Maior. Analyzing mainly their historical work, we want to approach the members of this so-called “Siebenbürger trias” as Enlightenment historians, in the context of a German-Austrian Aufklärung. The history of Roman Dacia is for the representatives of the Transylvanian School an essential episode in the formation of the Romanian nation and thus it is integrated into a chronicle, a history of the Romanians that begins somewhere in the past and continues to their days. The authors are well informed on provincial realities, according to the current image of the era in which they write. Their sources indicate both the knowledge of antiquarian literature of the humanists from Hungary and Transylvania, as well as the historiographical productions of the 18th century regarding the ancient realities of the Lower Danube. They are in syncronism with the currents of ideas of their era, with their contemporary historical research methods and in dialogue or polemic with the German-Austrian historiography of the time. The representatives of the Transylvanian School are ideologically mobilized and discuss at length the key moments of birth of the Romanian nation, which assumes the extermination of the autochthonous (Dacian) component, ignobile, if not impure, respectively the uninterrupted continuity of “Trajan’s colonists” in the hearth of Dacia. Getting lost in this, then and now, sterile polemic sometimes, they partially ignore the richness of the provincial history. Their discourse about Dacia as a province is, in fact, a modern gesticulation on a Renaissance documentary basis.