Perspective istoriografice privind spațiul sacru al Sibiului în evul mediu

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the historiography that describes and investigates the components which compose the sacred spaces of Sibiu in the Middle Ages. It is well known that Sibiu had a preeminent position in the urban hierarchy of medieval Transylvania and of the south-eastern Europe. The city was attested for the first time in 1191 as an ecclesiastical center of the Transylvanian Saxons and was home to numerous places of worship and sacred sites (churches, monasteries, chapels, cemeteries, hospitals etc.). However, with the advent of the Reformation in the 16th century and the noticeable changes that occurred during the industrial age and the communist dictatorship (the 19th and 20th centuries), the medieval sacred building and their neighborhoods have been deeply transformed and medieval ecclesiastical topography became unrecognizable in modern day Sibiu. The recreation of the ecclesiastical topography and even more of the sacred spaces could be recreated through analyses and research of different type of sources from charters and town chronicles of the 16th-18th centuries to the most recent archaeological studies or papers on medieval art, architecture, or historical urban evolution. With this in mind, the study aims to provide references on the topic and establishes the main periods of the historiography and their relevant ideological and theoretical changes during over 400 hundred years of debates or research.