Phantom Borders and Nostalgia: German Women’s Associations in the Second Polish Republic after 1918

Paula Lange

University of Vienna, Department of History

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 Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 3 (2025): 373-401  DOI 10.38145/2025.3.373

Transformations associated with the end of World War I had an immense impact on the population of the former Prussian partition area, most of which became, in the wake of the war, the Second Polish Republic. Members of the German women’s associations, which had existed before 1918, found themselves in a new situation. As members of a national minority in the newly established Polish state, they were confronted with a reversed balance of power. Meanwhile, women’s suffrage had been introduced, opening up new political spaces of action for women. This article examines gender-related spaces of action for German women in this region after 1918 and explores the strategies and points of reference used by these women. The two examples on which it focuses, the Vaterländischer Frauenverein in Graudenz/Grudziądz and the work of feminist activist Martha Schnee in Bromberg/Bydgoszcz, are examined using the concepts of phantom borders and nostalgia.

Keywords: Second Polish Republic, German women’s associations, phantom borders, nostalgia, interwar period

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Austro-Hungarian Women’s Activism from the Southern “Periphery” Across Ethnic Lines

Agatha Schwartz

University of Ottawa

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 14 Issue 3 (2025): 351-372 DOI 10.38145/2025.3.351

Through the examples of Adél Nemessányi, Milica Tomić, Jelica Belović-Bernadžikovska, and Nafija Sarajlić, four women activists, public workers, and writers from the southern “peripheries” of Austria-Hungary who belonged to different ethnic groups, this paper examines the complex local, regional, and trans-regional aspects of women’s awakening and organizing in the Dual Monarchy. While none of these four women belonged to any associations that demanded political rights for women, their public work and activism, which took multiple forms, greatly contributed to the improvement of women’s public image, education, and social status in their own time, leaving an imprint on future generations. Through both the personal and professional lives of these remarkable women, we can discern connections that transgress ethnic, regional, and national boundaries and also reflect international developments in the fight for women’s rights. This ethnically varied sample of exceptionally educated women pioneers from parts of the Dual Monarchy that would later become Yugoslavia demonstrates what women were able to accomplish despite an overall conservative social environment.

Keywords: women’s rights, regional and trans-regional developments, feminism from the “periphery”

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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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