The beginnings of writing in the Romanian language and the ideology of the Protestant Reformation

Abstract

The article explores the origins of Romanian writing, emphasizing its close connection to the religious and cultural transformations in Central and Eastern Europe during the Reformation era. The author points out that, unlike the Western Romance languages, the written tradition of Romanian developed relatively late—only in the 15th–16th centuries. Earlier, Church Slavonic dominated as the language of liturgy, administration, and culture, which resulted from the Byzantine-Slavic character of the Christianization of the Vlachs. The aim of the study is to reconstruct the factors that led to the spread of the Romanian language in writing and liturgy, with particular attention to the influence of Reformation ideology. The analysis draws on historical and linguistic sources, including the oldest manuscripts of psalms and fragments of the New Testament (the Voroneț Psalter, the Voroneț Codex), as well as religious prints from the 16th century. Two competing hypotheses regarding the origins of these texts are compared: the Hussite one, referring to the idea of translating the Bible into vernacular languages, and the Protestant one, linking the beginnings of Romanian writing with the activity of Lutheran and Calvinist circles in Transylvania. The author concludes that Protestant influence—especially the printing work of the Orthodox deacon Coresi in Brașov—was a decisive factor in the development of the Romanian written language. The Reformation’s call for the translation of the Holy Scriptures into national languages accelerated the process of nationalizing Romanian Orthodoxy and transformed Romanian into a fully legitimate medium of literary and religious expression.