Positive Influence: Negotiating a Church Historiographical Canon with the West

Abstract

The present article discusses the way in which the historiographical canon on the history of the Orthodox and Greek Catholic Churches in Transylvania during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was reconceptualized during and in the aftermath of the academic visit of Western specialists in Romania. Keith Hitchins’s visit to Romania in the early 1970s to undertake research in the church archives for his work on the history of the Romanian intelligentsia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire made an impact on how the history of the Greek Catholic Church was portrayed in the religious journals of the Romanian Orthodox Church. The subtle shifts in the canon included distinguishing the Greek Catholics from the Orthodox in Transylvania and reintroducing the Greek Catholic interwar historiography into the interpretation.