A Discourse of Memory:
A History of the Romanians in Transylvania

Tanya Dunlap

Institute on East Central Europe
Columbia University

March, 1996

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Romanian scholars in Transylvania authored historical texts in the vernacular Romanian language to further their demands for political rights within the Habsburg Empire.Their arguments suggested that Romanians, by virtue of having settled the region first as Roman colonists in the second century, were entitled to the same political status as the Hungarian and Saxon peoples who had historically dominated Transylvanian political affairs.By using history to serve political interests of'the present,' the Romanian intellectuals' texts became a source of controversy. Eager to preserve their privileged status, Hungarian and Saxon historians denied the validity of the Romanian historical works and argued that the Hungarians had settled the region first in the ninth century and had invited the Saxons to help them in the early thirteenth century. To entice the Saxons to leave their homeland, the Hungarian leader granted the Germanic people a charter delineating specific political rights and responsibilities. Hungarian and Saxon intellectuals claimed that the Romanians had migrated to Transylvania in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries without such a charter and were for this reason denied political rights.

In this manner historical texts became weapons in a political battle.The Romanian scholars wrote the historical accounts to support specific political claims.Their narratives established the framework for future generations to consider the past and eventually replaced the Romanian community's living social memory with an official version. ₁ The intellectuals' work constructed a national Romanian identity based on ethnic and linguistic elements and laid the theoretical foundation for the development of the modern Romanian nation-state.

History, Social Memory and Identity

Patrick Hutton has described history as an art of memory because it adjudicates the relationship between the unconscious presence of traditions and the conscious efforts to recall the past. ₂ Originally, writing was an adjunct of living social memory. In oral cultures, a community's social memory consisted of legal and social customs, rights and duties that were not consciously recorded but rather were unconsciously present. In this sense, these social memories were a living, fluid discourse through which a community experienced its surroundings. ₃ However, with the emergence of writing, literate members of the society, primarily aristocrats and clergy, recorded the living memories to preserve them. Print then froze these memories in textual forms and gradually replaced them as a source of knowledge. ₄ The texts served as a deposit for officially-documented, as opposed to living or organic, social memories.

The intellectuals of the Enlightenment period attempted to transform the living social memories into a form that could be communicated, "that could be made knowable." ₅ This interpretative process, however, is highly selective and hence subject to manipulation. ₆ Given social memory's subjective nature, it is often distorted and inaccurate.Sometimes scholars can verify social memory, but frequently claims cannot be checked for accuracy.For the study of social memory, this does not really pose a problem. All that really matters is that the group believes the official social memory --"at least at some level." ₇

The degree to which a society accepts an official social memory depends in large part on how closely the official version parallels the living memory. ₈ In important ways, "the practice of historical reconstruction (of an official social memory) receives a guiding impetus from, and can in turn give significant shape to, the memory of social groups." ₉ Hence, the more closely the official social memories correspond to the living social memories (which may have evolved over centuries), the more acceptable the official version will be for the respective community.The differences can be accounted for in the needs of the present.

According to Michel Foucault, what a community remembers about its past is continuously being remolded in the group's present discourse and "depends on the way it is represented."Hutton claims that this process "has more to do with the present power of groups to fashion its image than with the ability of historians to evoke its memory." ₁₀ Instead of searching the past for traces of social memory, "each age reconstructs the past with images that suit its present needs." ₁₁ Therefore, "what has been conceived of as the past transmitted was reconceived as the past reconstructed." The reality of the past resides in the form of its representation, its image. ₁₂

The images that authors create provide the foundation of national identity and become permanent objects of analysis and re-analysis. ₁₃ Knowledge of a community is communicated through the organization of such images, which often serve to legitimate a particular social order. ₁₄ Thus, groups with competing interests can develop different images that promote their positions. Because a community's needs change with time, the leaders of the community foster new images to reconstruct appropriate identities that serve their present ambitions.Social memory and national identity are consequently subjective constructions that are constantly revised to suit the needs of 'the present.' Because historical documents are one of the vehicles of discourse used to reconstruct the past (as well as images, social memory, and identity), contemporary scholars can examine the inscribed discourse to determine how the past was continuously modified, and to a lesser extent, how the authors used it for specific purposes.

In nineteenth-century Europe, the influence of Enlightenment culture generated a specific notion of progress based on the concept of the secular nation. Intellectuals imagined a nation as a natural, internally homogeneous entity with a unique identity, defined by precise spatial, temporal and cultural boundaries and historical origins. ₁₅ Nineteenth-century historians consciously combined living social memories with scholarship to explicate a history of the nation with which they personally identified. ₁₆

Writing in the vernacular, these intellectuals "invited the masses into history" with a language they understood. As the vernacular then became an important component of national identity, building particular solidarities and thereby fostering an imagined community of specific language speakers, nineteenth-century intellectuals devoted their attention to creating grammars and dictionaries of colloquial languages.These works helped to foster a sense of egalitarianism among languages with every distinct tongue "entitled to (its) autonomous place in a fraternity of equals." ₁₇

The intense historical and linguistic activities of nineteenth-century intellectuals were essential to the formation of European nationalism. ₁₈ Their efforts defined the nineteenth century conception of nation and provided that entity with official social memories and with languages that were regarded as the nation's personal property. ₁₉ John Gillis claims that by decoding such concepts as national identity, we can discover the relationships created and sustained by them.A brief history of the Transylvanian experience confirms his thesis.

The Romanian Community in Transylvania

In the first half of the fifteenth century, Hungarian and Saxon nobles established their political dominance over Transylvania after they entered into an alliance to suppress a violent peasant revolt. This agreement restricted ruling class membership to three nations --Magyar, Szekler and Saxon --the first two representing ethnic Hungarians and the latter Germanic Saxons. Membership in a nation (natio) was determined by noble or privileged status. Thus, only those who had acquired special rights and immunities could participate in the political life of Transylvania. The alliance excluded Hungarian and Saxon peasants as well as all Romanians who were not even mentioned.

When Turkish forces conquered central Hungary (the Pannonian Plain just northwest of Transylvania) in the middle of the sixteenth century, Transylvania gained greater independence from the Hungarian crown. This arrangement left Transylvania's ruling Hungarian and Saxon nobles relatively isolated from the rest of the Hungarian kingdom and allowed them to consolidate their political domination of Transylvania within the local diet.

Originally, all the ruling classes were Roman Catholic.However, during the Protestant Reformation, many Saxons and Hungarians converted to the Lutheran, Calvinist and Unitarian churches and forced the Transylvanian diet to define religious privileges.In the latter half of the sixteenth century the diet granted the above Protestant churches equality with the Roman Catholic Church. ₂₀ Thus the concept of nation was redefined to include religious affiliation. The Orthodox Romanians remained outside of political life as an unrecognized, powerless people.

However, the subsequent decline of the Ottoman Empire in the late seventeenth century allowed the Habsburg crown to expand its authority over both Central Hungary and Transylvania.This development had significant implications for the political, social and cultural life of Transylvania.To emphasize Vienna's control of the region, Emperor Leopold I issued the Leopoldine Diploma in December 1691 to confirm the political and religious rights and privileges of the Hungarian and Saxon nations. Orthodox clergy and Romanian peasantry who adhered to the Orthodox faith remained isolated and excluded from official recognition. However, under Habsburg rule, Romanians in Transylvania became increasingly important to Vienna because the Catholic Emperor hoped to counter the Protestant influences in the region by converting the Orthodox to Catholicism. ₂₁

Because Leopold I did not entertain any illusions about the ease of such a conversion, he devised a strategy that would gradually incorporate the Orthodox faithful into the Latin church through an intermediate, Uniate church that would unite the two faiths. Just after issuing the 1691 Diploma, Leopold I approached high-ranking Orthodox clergy with an offer to exchange political concessions for their acceptance of the union of the Orthodox rite with the Catholic Church based on the four Articles of the Council of Florence of 1439 (which had briefly overcome differences between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches). Accordingly, the Orthodox clergy who would join the Uniate church by accepting the authority of the Pope, unleavened Eucharist bread, the existence of purgatory and the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, would gain the same privileges as the Catholic clergy. ₂₂ Wary of official promises, the Orthodox metropolitan of Transylvania requested that the Emperor specify the terms of agreement with an imperial diploma and conditioned adherence to the new Uniate (or Greek Catholic) faith upon the realization of imperial concessions. ₂₃

To satisfy these demands, Leopold issued two additional decrees in 1699 and in 1701.The former, known as the First Leopoldine Diploma, granted to the Orthodox who accepted the union the same privileges enjoyed by Roman Catholic clergy and an exemption from labor service and payment of tithes. The Second Leopoldine Diploma promised Orthodox priests, laymen and even commoners the same privileges enjoyed by the Catholic estates. Though not understood at first, the Second Diploma had significant influence on the development of Romanian political consciousness, for it implied that not only Orthodox clergy but also laymen and commoners who joined the Uniate church could achieve privileged status. ₂₄ Thus, unintentionally, the union represented a political act for the Romanians in Transylvania. ₂₅ Different interpretations resulting from these documents laid the foundation from which future Romanian leaders in Transylvania would demand equal status for all Romanians.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Uniate clergy labored to achieve full equality with the other accepted religions in the face of great resistance from the privileged groups. Becoming increasingly aware of their unique potential to influence socio-political affairs, they gradually began to view the opposition to the Uniate church as animosity to Romanians in general. Bishop Inochenti Micu-Klein (or Clain) sent petitions to Vienna which contained demands for all Romanians, Uniate and Orthodox. ₂₆ When the crown forwarded the demands to the Transylvanian Chancellery(the new diet established in 1691), the resulting friction sped up the transformation of the campaign for the union into a movement for official recognition of all Romanians. In strong contrast to the medieval understanding of nation based on noble status, prominent clergy redefined the concept in terms of common religion, language, and customs. The latter elements remained intricately connected to the Orthodox faith. ₂₇

The masses of Romanian peasants lived in an oral culture, a religious milieu devoid of past or future.Their living social memories that provided the framework through which they experienced life were shaped foremost by Orthodox Christianity. Orthodoxy was more than a religious rite, comprising "a complex heritage of faith and religious practices intertwined with age-old folk customs that had been passed down from generation to generation." ₂₈ Although they realized that they were Romanian and that their Latin language differentiated them from other Slavic Orthodox peoples, they did not define their community by ethnic or linguistic characteristics, but by religious faith. ₂₉ Therefore the formation of the Uniate Church and the drive to convert the Orthodox resulted in a backlash in the latter half of the eighteenth century that ultimately doomed the church union.

Unlike the Romanian peasants, Uniate leaders in Transylvania in the final decades of the eighteenth century subtly constructed a perception of religious identity to include linguistic and historical factors, in essence moving toward a modern conception of national identity. ₃₀ Concomitantly, principles of the Enlightenment convinced many leaders that reason and education could solve the social problems of the Romanian community. To this end, Uniate intellectuals who had studied abroad in Vienna and Rome pursued more secular interests. When they returned to Transylvania, they dedicated their efforts to the education of the Romanian communities, creating Romanian dictionaries and grammars and writing historical texts in the Romanian vernacular to inform them of their glorious Roman past and consequently of their historical rights to constitutional status. This particular interpretation was later labeled the Transylvanian School. ₃₁

Characterized by increasingly secular ideologies with political agendas, Romanian efforts to reinterpret their identity in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century demonstrates the influence of enlightened thought and European concepts of modernity. The clearest and earliest expressions of the secular views preceded the efforts of Transylvanian scholars by more than a century. Wealthy Wallachian and Moldavian chroniclers also sought to establish the historical link between the ancient Roman province of Dacia and the Romanian provinces in the form of historical texts. However, fundamental differences set apart their arguments from those of the Transylvania School. Transylvanian scholars employed historical texts as political weapons to gain constitutional status for all Romanians. In contrast, Moldavian and Wallachian chronicles were simply a call for the independence of Romanian nobles from Greek Phanariot rulers installed by the Ottoman Porte.

Among the earliest chroniclers, four contributed the most to the development of the ideas expressed by the Transylvanian School. ₃₂ Grigore Ureche (ca. 1590-1647), a Moldavian nobleman, wrote the first Romanian history of Moldavia that described an inherent unity among Romanian speaking peoples who, he claimed, shared a common heritage. Another Moldavian, Miron Costin (1633-1691), was the first to intimate that Roman colonists in Dacia (which he delimited as the present-day provinces of Transylvania, Banat and Western Wallachia) withdrew to the Carpathian mountains in the medieval period, from where they reemerged in the fourteenth century and moved to Moldavia. The most significant contribution came in 1710-1711 from Moldavian prince Dimitru Cantemir (1673-1723), who argued that the Romanians were the direct descendants of Roman colonists from Dacia. According to Cantemir's chronicle, the Romans exterminated all of the indigenous Dacians and then colonized the region. When barbarian invasions threatened the Romanized province, the population temporarily withdrew to the mountains and forests. This idea of a Romanian with pure Roman blood became a fundamental pillar of the future Transylvanian School's argument. A final chronicler, Constantine Cantacuzino from Wallachia (1640-1716) penned a history of Wallachia from the Roman colonization of Dacia to the invasion of Attila the Hun (mid-fifth century). In contrast to Cantemir, Cantacuzino claimed that the genesis of the Romanian people resulted from indigenous Dacian populations assimilating with Roman colonists to form a new Daco-Roman community. ₃₃

In the late eighteenth century in Transylvania, the inquiry into Romanians' historical experience assumed a more strictly political function. Responding to German authors who rejected the idea of the continuity of the Romanians from Dacia to the present and who thus repudiated Romanian efforts to achieve constitutional status, Romanian intellectuals of the Transylvanian School argued, like Cantemir, that the Romanians were pure, direct descendants of Roman colonists who had exterminated the indigenous population in the beginning of the second century AD. Their work led to the development of a concept of national identity based on historical origins and accepted as a socio-cultural fact. ₃₄ Invoking a process by which they labeled Romanians as opposed to others (Hungarians and Germans, for example), Transylvanian school intellectuals added ethnic components, as well as linguistic and historical evidence to a religious identity to serve specific political interests: those of constitutional status and official recognition by the Habsburg Emperor and the Transylvanian diet.

John Gillis describes the process of constructing identities in the late 1700s in both the fledgling United States and France as an attempt to break with the past and to create as large a difference and distance as possible between the old order and the newly-constructed regime. French and American national leaders exaggerated the backwardness and injustices of the immediate past and the medieval era in order to legitimize their claims that the new orders represented significant progress toward the creation of a modern world. To accomplish these aims, supporters of the new changes created a cult of new beginnings with original sets of memory practices and sites. ₃₅ Thus modernity in these countries consisted of efforts to reject old models as inappropriate for society's future foundations and to recreate new frameworks.

This process contrasts with the Romanian experience, where commemorative efforts reconstructed the present with historical models to provide a "just" framework for the future. In Romania, the initiative to reconstruct society fostered a cult of history and a whole set of practices to commemorate it. Transylvanian intellectuals founded the new era on historical origins, old ideals, values, and privileges. For these scholars, the new social order and the conception of modernity sprang forth from both ancient and medieval historical rights and traditions. They envisioned a break from the present, not from the past.

The catalyst for the politicization of history occurred in the 1780s with the reforms of the enlightened despot, Joseph II. ₃₆ Believing that the changes which he considered necessary for the modernization of the Empire should come from the top, Joseph II attempted to undertake political, administrative, economic, social, religious and cultural reforms throughout the state, challenging many accepted traditions and practices. ₃₇ The most significant changes for the Romanians in Transylvania concerned the emancipation of serfdom in 1783 and 1785, the expansion and revision of the Romanian educational system (to be conducted in their national language), and the Edict of Toleration in 1781 which legalized Orthodoxy and granted the Romanian nation equal status with the other privileged classes. ₃₈

These changes in theory uprooted the entrenched nobility and generated great resistance from them, while such changes conversely met many of the demands made by the Transylvanian intellectuals of the eighteenth century and encouraged them to continue to work to gain further concessions. By 1790, the Magyar and Saxon upper classes united to protest against the reforms. Their intractability, combined with a financial crisis resulting from war with the Ottoman Empire and with the events of 1789 in France, convinced Joseph II to appease the privileged orders, and he revoked all of the reforms except those concerning emancipation and religious toleration. ₃₉

The renunciation of the Josephine reforms and the frequent vocalization of Romanian demands throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century incited great debate and intensified the politicization of the arguments. With heightened suspicions and perceived threats of the erosion of their power under Joseph II, the privileged orders reacted with historical arguments against the Romanian demands for further concessions. ₄₀ The governing classes then used these oppositional texts as justification to maintain the status quo and protect their own power. /p>

Franz Joseph Sulzer was the first Saxon intellectual to deny the Romanians' Roman origins and their continual presence in Transylvania since the Roman conquest in his work, Geschichte der transalpinischen Daciens (1781-1782). Citing linguistic evidence, the German historian declared that the Romanians had migrated from regions south of the Danube in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. According to Sulzer, the similarity between the dialects of Vlachs (a term used to identify Romanians and other Latin speaking peoples --also spelled "Olahs" and "Vallachs") north and south of the Danube indicated that the Romanians in Transylvania had originally come from present-day Macedonia. His denial roused the historical forces of the Romanian intellectuals in Transylvania and initiated a historiographical war that has continued to the present day. ₄₁

Shortly after the death of Joseph II in 1790, Romanian intellectuals drew up a petition entitled Supplex Libellus Valachorum ₄₂ in which they demanded equality with the Hungarians and Saxons and the restitution of the Josephine reforms. To support their arguments, they claimed entitlements to historical rights as descendants of Roman colonists brought to Transylvania by the Emperor Trajan in the second century AD. The authors maintained that when Roman forces evacuated the province in the third century, the Roman colonists remained and evaded the barbarian invasions, electing their own rulers until the Hungarian conquest at the end of the ninth century. After the defeat of the Romanian prince Gelu by the Hungarian ruler Tuhutum, the Romanians elected Tuhutum as their own ruler. Under this arrangement, Hungarians and Romanians lived peacefully as equals (allowing for the difference between classes). The authors claimed that the political union of the Magyar, Szeklers and Saxons in 1437-1438 to suppress a peasant revolt had excluded the Romanian nation (understood as noble status) but had not deprived them of their rights and privileges. Later, the Protestant Reformation and subsequent efforts to retain religious gains in Transylvania resulted in several legislative acts to specify legal faiths. Defining the Reformation as a reaction within the Catholic Church, the authors argued that the diet omitted any mention of Orthodoxy because the Byzantine Church played no part in the religious movement. Not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did the governing "nations" systematically suppress the Romanians and classify them as "tolerated" for the benefit of the country. In reply to Sulzer's thesis that the term "Vlahi" or "Valahi" applied to populations south of the Danube, the Supplex stated that the Slavs used this term to denote either Roman, Italian, or Latin peoples. Accordingly the Slavs named the Romanians "Vlahi" when they came into contact with them in Transylvania in the seventh and eighth centuries and recognized their Latin language.

Largely ignored by the Transylvanian Chancellery, the intellectuals continued to demand their historic rights and submitted another detailed petition to the new Emperor Francis II in 1792. He also sent the document to the Chancellery; predictably, the diet again refused to grant any major concessions. Fearing for their own status, Magyars and Saxons responded with their own version of the history of Transylvania. I.C. Eder was one of the first to refute the Supplex. With a "point by point rebuttal" of Romanian claims, Eder largely reiterated Sulzer's thesis that denied the pure latinity of Romanians' origins as well as their continuity in Transylvania. Johann C. von Engel also rejected Romanian arguments and maintained that they had not lived in Dacia continuously since the Roman period, but had only migrated there later. ₄₃

Reacting to these accusations, three scholars of the Transylvanian School, Samuil Micu-Klein (or Clain), Gheorge Sincai, and Petru Maior produced detailed accounts of the Romanian ethnogenesis, continuity from Dacia to the present, and linguistic development. Repeating themes similar to those presented in the Supplex, Klein's 1806 work Scurta Cunostinta a Istorii Romanilor (A Brief Acknowledgment of the History of the Romanians) describes how all the indigenous inhabitants fled when the Roman legions took over and colonized Dacia in 105 AD. When the Roman Emperor Aurelian evacuated his forces to fight the Persians in the third century, Klein explains that they withdrew to the region south of the Danube and renamed it Aurelian's Dacia. Administrators, farmers and other settlers remained in the former colony, Trajan's Dacia. This account implies that the Romanian nation developed from those settlers of Trajan's Dacia independent of direct Roman rule. To prove that the Romanians descended directly from the Romans, Klein enumerates dates of celebrations and customs common to both peoples. ₄₄

In his work Hronica Romanilor (History of the Romanians, published in 1806), Gheorge Sincai claims that Trajan's Roman army completely exterminated the indigenous Dacian population during the conquest. In their place, he asserts that colonists from all over the Empire, but especially from Rome, settled the region. Sincai consciously counters Eder's argument that all the Roman colonists evacuated Dacia when Aurelian withdrew his army to reinforce the campaign against the Persians in the third century. He argues that the remaining Roman settlers continued to inhabit the region with their own rulers until the time of the Hungarian migration, when they submitted to and united with the Hungarian tribes as equals. ₄₅

Petru Maior wrote the most detailed and influential history of the Transylvania School, Istoria Pentru Inceputul Romanilor in Dacia (History of the Beginnings of the Romanians in Dacia). Refuting the arguments of the Saxon authors Sulzer, Eder and von Engel, Maior attempts to demonstrate the pure Roman heritage of the Romanians and the continuity of the Roman colonists in the region from the second to the nineteenth centuries. According to Maior, the Romans exterminated most of the Dacians and any remaining indigenous peoples fled the region for fear of Roman domination. ₄₆ To repopulate the area, Maior claims, thousands of settlers came to the new Roman Province where they tilled the land and organized their society according to Roman law. ₄₇ When Aurelian evacuated his military forces, Maior argues, the majority of the settlers remained in Dacia as a pure race, even during the barbarian invasions. ₄₈ Like Klein and Sincai, Maior also asserted that the Romanian people voluntarily united with the Hungarian tribes as a free people. ₄₉

To have an identity, a nation needs an origin, a founding moment that legitimizes its birth. ₅₀ The Transylvanian School's preoccupation with the ethnogenesis of the Romanian people demonstrates Pierre Nora's notion of a cult of continuity. Nora explains that the confident assumption of knowing to whom and to what a people owes its existence gives meaning and a sense of the sacred to a society engaged in a process of secularization. ₅₁ The greater the origins, the more they magnify the nation's greatness. ₅₂ The Transylvanian School historians claimed political rights as descendants of the Roman "masters of the world." ₅₃ By associating their lineage with Rome, they created a noble heritage worthy of official recognition.

The documentation of historical origins and the development of the Romanian nation by scholars of the Transylvanian School constructed an identity and commemorated it, establishing written sites of an official memory (as opposed to a living memory) of the Romanian people. ₅₄ These sites, in the form of historical texts, preserved Romanian intellectuals' efforts to shape their past and to provide an official social memory for future scholars. Their printed version was acceptable to the Romanian community because the living social memory served as the historical foundation of the official, documented social memory. When early nineteenth-century Romanian intellectuals used historical scholarship to redefine the religious nature of the living social memory, they added details and descriptions to explain the origins of the Romanian Orthodox community's Latin language. Their effort effectively reshaped the community's social memory. Their writing inscribed the new social memory in textual forms of the newly emerging print culture and provide a trail through which contemporary scholars can trace the reconstructive process, the evolution of a concept, the formation of an official memory.

The official memories (national histories) rely heavily on a spatial framework in such a way that the place and the group "...have each received the imprint of the other." ₅₅ Without the ancient Roman province of Dacia, the Romanian national memory as the Transylvanian School envisioned it cannot exist. To "recall" the province, one thinks of a common Romanian historical experience beginning with the Roman conquest. ₅₆ Any change to the spatial component symbolizes a threat to the national identity. ₅₇ Thus the material aspect of these memories plays an influential and sensitive role. When Saxon authors challenged the Supplex's claims of Romanian continuity in Dacia, the intellectuals of the Transylvanian School responded with accounts detailing pure Roman heritage and uninterrupted histories of the Romanians in Dacia. Dacia thus became an image, spatially constructed, to buttress the competing social memories of the different communities.

When images are inscribed in print as constructed social memories, they tend to crowd out alternative representations of the past. ₅₈ "Nations do not remember spontaneously;" social memory is created by a society's elites. As the influence of the Enlightenment spread throughout Europe, literate clergy and aristocrats wrote the first national histories. Later in the nineteenth century, upper and middle classes inherited their mantle as "bearers of national memory." ₅₉ Their representations of the past were effectively "shaped by millions of printed words into a concept on the printed page and in due course into a model" that influenced the social memories of future generations. ₆₀

The printed medium required a colloquial language in order for the official social memories to reach a wide audience. To this end, the Transylvanian School intellectuals created linguistic reference materials, grammars, and dictionaries that helped to standardize the Romanian vernacular. ₆₁ These materials circulated among literate members of the Romanian-speaking community and were used in early nineteenth century schools. ₆₂ The refined colloquial Romanian served as a national language and distinguished Romanian speaking peoples from 'others.' The Romanian national language built solidarities among all Romanian speakers and hence shaped a newly-emerging modern national identity of the Romanian community. ₆₃

The Transylvanian School decisively influenced the generation of 1848 revolutionaries who struggled to establish an independent Romanian nation-state. ₆₄ Building on the recorded social memories and consciously constructed images of the early nineteenth century intellectuals, these revolutionaries produced their own official social memories and images to define a modern national identity that 'required' statehood. They authored pamphlets, historical texts, newspapers and educational reference materials to inform and mobilize the Romanian nation to demand an autonomous state.

The works of the Transylvanian School laid the conceptual foundation of a modern Romanian nation. Their officially-documented social memories, inscribed in print, established the building blocks of a modern Romanian national identity that subsequent generations reconstructed to meet their own needs. Thus, contemporary historians can examine the documents of specific periods to determine how the Romanian community's social memories and national identities were continuously reconstructed according to the ambitions of different generations. Throughout the 1800s, "the idea of nation-state came to dominate all earlier conceptions of community." ₆₅ Nineteenth-century historians examined the past from the conceptual framework of the present and in effect commemorated the formation of the modern nation-state as if it had always existed as a socio-cultural fact. ₆₆ Today, scholars recognize that the concept of the nation-state did not always exist but was constructed over time through the work of intellectuals and social elites. In Romania, the Transylvanian School accelerated this process and developed the modern conceptualization of nation upon which future nineteenth-century efforts to establish a Romanian nation-state were built.