Maria Crăciun - Biography#

Maria Crăciun is professor emerita in the Department of Medieval, Early Modern and Art History of the Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania. Her PhD thesis on Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century Moldavia, published as a monograph in 1996, marked the beginning of her interest in confessional identity and religious cohabitation. Starting from the premise that confessional identity has a visual, a material, a ritual and a spatial component, subsequent studies began to explore the role of images within late medieval religious experience, particularly in the context of the Eucharistic cult, and finally focused on the place of the visual in late medieval and early modern communication systems and its interconnectivity with texts. The same early interest in religious/confessional identity has led to an exploration of confessional visual cultures, while encouraging a cultural approach to religious practice and devotional patterns, analyzing not just images but also spaces, performances and objects. Interest in identity has also fostered focus on the individuals and communities who commissioned ecclesiastical furnishings and were the recipients of the messages conveyed by both visual and textual means. This has fueled an interest in book ownership, use of books, especially those used in worship, and confessional book cultures which mirrored the drive towards confessionalization in early modern Transylvania. The confessionalization process directed attention to the bonds created during communal worship and as a consequence of disciplining strategies, initiated by both clergy and secular authorities, which impacted the lives of both men and women. This process has brought to the fore the gendered dimension of identity, slowly turning it into an essential variable in more recent research interests. As late medieval and early modern society in Transylvania was hardly monochrome, attention has inevitably turned to the various groups that formed it, both hegemonic and subaltern, and on their efforts to amass cultural capital and build social networks. Communication between the different groups and within each group, power struggles and the drive towards discipline as well as subaltern voices have been examined subsequently. Research results have been published in several articles and a monograph dedicated to Lutheran visual cultures of early modern Transylvania. Initially tested within the context of teaching and research seminars, these scholarly interests have been discussed in conference presentations and several international projects. In these contexts, discussions with international research teams have led to their refinement.