Exploring Transylvania: Geographies of Knowledge and Entangled Histories in a Multiethnic Province, 1790–1918

Borbála Zsuzsanna Török is Associated Research Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz. As a historian of modern Europe, her research analyzes the configuration of scholarship in imperial settings, including her co-edited volume Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires (Palgrave, 2014).

• Acknowledgements ... ixList of Illustrations ... xiList of Geographical Names in Transylvania ... xiiiIntroduction ... 1Nineteenth-Century Transylvanian Intellectual Milieus ... 1Science in the Composite Monarchy ... 11Interlocking Scientific Cultures in the Province ... 231 Landeskunde, honismeret—Patriotic Scholarship and Vernacular Languages ... 27The Heritage of Josephist Politics: Impulses to Historiography ... 30Language Politics and Education: Synchronizing Transylvania with the Polite World ... 34Stages of National Improvement: Diagnosing Backwardness ... 42The Regional Particularities of Landeskunde: Hierarchy of Civilizations ... 46The Hungarian Language Society: Fencing off Vernacular Culture ... 502 The Friends of Progress in the Transylvanian Age of Reform ... 58Grassroots Scholarship: Verein für Siebenbürgische Landeskunde ... 62Regional or National Science? A Saxon-Hungarian Dispute at the Transylvanian Diet ... 76Learned Sociability and Projects of National Improvement ... 84The Image of Transylvania in Foreign Travelogues ... 993 The Nationalization of Landeskunde and Civic Ethos after 1848 ... 107Politics, Public Life, and Self-Formation during the Neo-Absolutist Decade ... 109The Consolidation of the Landeskundeverein under Austrian Auspices ... 117Saxon Landeskunde between Erudition and Popularization ... 125The Transylvanian Museum Society: historia magistra vitae ... 136Magyar honismeret: An Appendage of Pest? ... 149ASTRA and Romanian Cross-Border Scholarly Communication ... 1564 Uneven Development during the Austro-Hungarian Compromise (1867–1914) 163Landeskunde: Virtual Collection of the Transylvanian Saxon Past ... 164“The Border between History and Political Essay is Difficult to Draw”: Public Landeskunde ... 177The Museum Society: Facing Professionalization ... 188Musealization of honismeret: National History in Context ... 194Middle-Class Academics against Aristocratic Amateurs? The Case of the Torma Collection ... 205“Our Leading Hungarian Race”: The National Edge of honismeret ... 2125 Conclusion ... 231Geographies (and Temporalities) of Polymath Learning ... 231What was Landeskunde? ... 237The Transformation of the Republic of Letters in the Nation-State ... 240Bibliography ... 247Index ... 281

'Exploring Transylvania is not a book to be filed away in a single geographic or chronological pigeonhole. It is a worthy contribution to the ongoing task of “Europeanizing” the history of East Central Europe while still taking the region seriously on its own merits. Likewise, it is a salutary challenge to often illusory barriers of periodization separating the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. And even though Török’s narrative contains a considerable number of moving parts, she does an admirable job of orchestrating them in a way that not only makes easy for the reader to engage with the text.' Andrew Behrendt in: H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews. April, 2018.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=49126