Women’s History in Greece through The Ladies’ Journal of Kallirhoe Siganou-Parren:
Class, National Identity, and Reformist Activism
in the Formation of Women’s Associations (1887–1917)

Marina Bantiou

University of Peloponnese

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 3 (2025): 317-350 DOI 10.38145/2025.3.317

This paper investigates how The Ladies’ Journal (Efimeris ton Kyrion), edited by Kallirhoe Siganou-Parren between 1887 and 1917, constructed a gendered historical consciousness and mobilized national history as a vehicle for women’s civic inclusion in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Greece. Through a qualitative content and discourse analysis of selected articles from the journal’s complete digitized archive, the study examines how Parren strategically invoked historical female figures, from classical Antiquity to the Greek War of Independence and the Byzantine era, to legitimize women’s public roles within a framework of patriotic maternalism and bourgeois respectability. These representations restored women to history and actively recast historical memory as a tool for moral instruction, civic pedagogy, and reformist activism. While rooted in nationalist ideology, the journal’s narratives also reflected transnational influences through Parren’s engagement with international feminist networks and suffrage congresses. The article argues that this hybrid mode of popular historiography simultaneously enabled middle-class women’s symbolic integration into the nation and reinforced prevailing class and gender hierarchies. Ultimately, it situates The Ladies’ Journal as a formative site for the articulation of women’s associative practices and reformist discourse, while also critically assessing its role in shaping the terms and limits of female civic identity.

Keywords: women’s history in Greece, Kallirhoe Parren, Ephimeris ton Kyrion, feminist historiography, Greek women’s associations, maternalism, Greek feminist movement

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Oskan Erewanc‘i as a Translator from and into Latin

Alessandro Orengo

Università di Pisa

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 274-291  DOI 10.38145/2025.2.274

Oskan vardapet Erewanc‘i (1614–1674) was a prominent Armenian printer, best known for producing the first printed edition of the Armenian Bible (Amsterdam, 1666–1668). He was also active as a translator both from and into Latin. Erewanc‘i translated and subsequently abridged a grammatical treatise originally composed in Latin by the Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639). While the full translation survives in a few manuscripts, the abridged version was printed in 1666 by the same Amsterdam-based press that issued the Bible. In addition, Oskan contributed to a Latin translation of the shorter version of Koriwn’s Life of Maštoc‘. Although the original Life was composed in the fifth century, it also exists in a later abridged form, which served as the basis for Oskan’s translation. This paper examines Oskan’s role as a translator between Latin and Armenian, focusing on his objectives and methods.

Keywords: Oskan Erewanc‘i, Tommaso Campanella, Koriwn, Armenian language, Latin language, translations

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From East to West: The Greek Prayer of Cyprian and its Translation into European Vernaculars

Daniel Vaucher

University of Freiburg (CH)
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 247-273  DOI 10.38145/2025.2.247

The Prayer of Cyprian is an exorcistic and apotropaic prayer that gained popularity in Western Europe, particularly on the Iberian Peninsula and in South America. Since the fifteenth century, it has been transmitted in numerous versions and languages. Notably, the prayer came under the scrutiny of the Inquisition due to its alleged attribution to Saint Cyprian of Antioch and the inclusion of superstitious elements. As a result, it was listed in the Index of Prohibited Books. Until now, the origins of this apotropaion have remained unexplored. This article is the first to illuminate the clear connections between the vernacular recensions and the Greek manuscripts. An examination of the manuscripts, along with their copyists and owners, further reveals that the prayer travelled from East to West during the Renaissance, was translated into Latin, and subsequently rendered into vernacular languages.

Keywords: devotional prayer, exorcism, magic, inquisition, translations

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Fourteenth-Century Developments in Armenian Grammatical Theory through Borrowing and Translation: Contexts and Models of Yovhannes  K‘ṛnets‘i’s¹ Grammar Book

Gohar Muradyan

Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, Yerevan

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 214-246 DOI 10.38145/2025.2.214

The description of Armenian grammar has a long history. Several decades after the  in­vention of the alphabet by Mesrop Mashtots, probably in the second half of the fifth century, Dionysius Thrax’ Ars grammatica was translated from Greek. Until the four­teenth century, eleven commentaries were composed on Thrax’s work. The Ars created the bulk of the Armenian grammatical terminology and artificially ascribed some peculiarities of the Greek language to Armenian. In the 1340s Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i wrote a work entitled On Grammar. He was the head of the Catholic K‘ṛna monastery in Nakhijewan which was founded by Catholic missionaries sent to Eastern Armenia and by their Armenian collaborators, the fratres unitores. K‘ṛnets‘i’s grammar survived in a single manuscript copied in 1350.

In K‘ṛnets‘i’s work, the section on phonetics, the names of the parts of speech and many grammatical categories follow Dionysius’ Ars grammatica. K‘ṛnets‘i also used Latin sources, introducing two sections on syntax, mentioning Priscian, and borrowing definitions from Petrus Helias’ Summa super Priscianum and other commentaries. This resulted in distinguishing substantive and adjective in the section on nouns, in a more realistic characterization of Armenian verbal tenses and voices and the introduction of notions and terms for sentences, their kinds, case government and agreement.

Keywords: Fratres unitores, Yovhannēs K‘ṛnets‘i, Priscianus, Petrus Helias, syntax

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Translating Popular Wisdom into Learned Language and Practice: 
Egbert of Liège’s Fecunda ratis and the Changing World of the Eleventh Century

Hiram Kümper

Historical Institute, University of Mannheim

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 186-213 DOI 10.38145/2025.2.186

This paper explores the Fecunda ratis, Egbert of Liège’s early eleventh-century didactic poem in Latin, as an example of the transformation of vernacular, orally transmitted wisdom into structured, literary pedagogy. Drawing on recent theoretical and philological research, it develops a typology of proverbial adaptation in Egbert’s work and analyzes the rhetorical and poetic strategies employed to integrate popular sayings into the moral and educational discourse of the cathedral school. In doing so, the study situates the Fecunda ratis within the broader context of the emerging homiletic and didactic culture of the eleventh century, highlighting its role in shaping the clerical ethos and institutional memory through the literary canonization of the popular voice.

Keywords: classical learning, Latin, vernacular, cathedral schools, Middle Ages

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What Factors Are Conducive to Coherence? 
Translation Activity in Late Medieval Western Europe:
A Sketch of a Research Program

Péter Bara

HUN-REN Research Center for the Humanities, Institute of History

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2025): 158-185  DOI 10.38145/2025.2.158 

Why is the history of intellectual change in the Middle Ages a history of selectively studied influences about which so few historians have dared venture generalizations? Why is it so rich with contradictions? And why do we have so little comprehensive knowledge about the translators behind these intellectual changes? To answer these questions, this article proposes a novel approach to the history of Greek-Latin translations between 1050 and 1350, which substantially reshaped the Medieval Latin intellectual landscape and the cultural history of Europe. After reviewing the conclusions in the most recent secondary literature, the essay offers a sketch of a historical analysis of translation-centered decision-making processes. In doing so, it singles out four hypotheses and describes four research areas corresponding to these assumptions. The proposed research examines the translators’ personalities and activities, their training, mobility, cultural patronage, networks and their audiences (including universities) that influenced their decisions when they chose to translate texts from Greek into Latin. Such an analysis will help us better understand the expanding cultural networks between the medieval Western and Eastern Mediterranean and the development of translations in Latin-using Western Europe.

Keywords: medieval translations, translations from Greek into Latin, medieval knowledge transfer, Byzantine influence on the medieval West 1100–1300

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