Naming and the Making of Historical Memory: the Politics of Princely Sobriquets in the Wallachian Chancery of the Sixteenth Century By Marian Coman

https://www.academia.edu/164504012/Naming_and_the_Making_of_Historical_Memory_the_Politics_of_Princely_Sobriquets_in_the_Wallachian_Chancery_of_the_Sixteenth_Century The present study is the first systematic attempt to explore the Wallachian chancery’s knowledge of the past and memorializing strategies, focusing on the princely sobriquets documented up to the end of the sixteenth century. My main contention is that the first historians of Wallachia were, in fact, the chancery scribes, even though they did not claim to write historical texts as such. Modern historians have rightly pointed out the intertextuality of medieval diplomas, as nearly every novel document of this kind referred to the prior acts of predecessors, thus contributing to a constant reshaping of the past. This way, diplomas served as a kind of memorials of former rulers and the sobriquets ascribed to them can be viewed as a rudimentary form of writing history. ...