Books by Constanta Vintila
This is a book about people caught between home and abroad, crossing
imperial boundaries in south... more This is a book about people caught between home and abroad, crossing
imperial boundaries in southeastern Europe at the beginning of the
modern age.
Through a series of life stories, which the author reconstructs with the
aid of many new sources, readers discover how certain men and women
defined and adapted their loyalties and affiliations, how they fashioned
their identities, how they enrolled their linguistic, political, economic,
and social resources to build a family and a career. Travelling between
Istanbul, Vienna, Trieste, Moscow, Bucharest, or Iaşi, individuals of
different backgrounds built their networks across borders, linking people
and objects and facilitating cultural transfer and material and social change.
Acest e-book este protejat de legea drepturilor de autor. Reproducerea sa integrală sau parţială,... more Acest e-book este protejat de legea drepturilor de autor. Reproducerea sa integrală sau parţială, multiplicarea sa prin orice mijloace şi sub orice formă, punerea sa la dispoziţie publică pe internet sau în reţele de calculatoare, stocarea temporară sau permanentă pe diverse dispozitive sau în sisteme care permit recuperarea informaţiei, gratuit sau în scop comercial, precum şi alte fapte similare, fără permisiunea scrisă a editurii reprezintă o încălcare a legislaţiei privind protecţia dreptului de autor şi se pedepsesc conform legilor în vigoare.
Lux, Modă şi Alte Bagatele Politiceşti ȋn Europa de Sud-Est, ȋn secolele XVI-XIX, Humanitas, 2021, 2021
Conduri de saftian și anterie de ghermeșut, fire de borangic și ibrișin, inele cu diamante și cer... more Conduri de saftian și anterie de ghermeșut, fire de borangic și ibrișin, inele cu diamante și cercei cu smaragduri, cucunari și cafea, cardamon și piper, covoare și evanghelii, mărgele și hurmuz, iatagane și puști, perine și așternuturi, linguri și besactele, untdelemn și zahar, șaluri și șalvari călătoresc în boccele și coropci, în lăzi și cufere, pe spatele catârilor sau în burțile corăbiilor, printre dealuri și munți, pe calea apelor sau pe drumurile prăfuite ale câmpiilor, legând Alep de București, Brașov de Viena, Sliven de Trieste, Zemun de Iași, Constantinopol de Sibiu. MămularIi, mărgelarii, marchitanii, bogasierii, diplomații, doctorii, botaniștii, chirurgii, feluritele obraze curioase, șarlatanii, tâlharii, mercenarii și dezertorii călătoresc odată cu mărfurile și obiectele, ducând mai departe idei revoluționare, gusturi noi, mode sofisticate, cunoștințe felurite. Cartea aceasta dezvăluie destine, oameni, slabiciuni și mode care dau seama de farmecul și culorile catorva secole din istoria lumii noastre de astăzi.
Conduri de saftian și anterie de ghermeșut, fire de borangic și ibrișin, inele cu diamante și cer... more Conduri de saftian și anterie de ghermeșut, fire de borangic și ibrișin, inele cu diamante și cercei cu smaragduri, cucunari și cafea, cardamon și piper, covoare și evanghelii, mărgele și hurmuz, iatagane și puști, perine și așternuturi, linguri și besactele, untdelemn și zahar, șaluri și șalvari călătoresc în boccele și coropci, în lăzi și cufere, pe spatele catârilor sau în burțile corăbiilor, printre dealuri și munți, pe calea apelor sau pe drumurile prăfuite ale câmpiilor, legând Alep de București, Brașov de Viena, Sliven de Trieste, Zemun de Iași, Constantinopol de Sibiu. Mămulari, mărgelari, marchitani, bogasieri, diplomați, doctori, botaniști, chirurgi, felurite obraze curioase, șarlatani, tâlhari, mercenari și dezertori călătoresc odată cu mărfurile și obiectele, ducând mai departe idei revoluționare, gusturi noi, mode sofisticate, cunoștințe felurite. Cartea de față dezvăluie, rând pe rând, fațetele diferite ale unor oameni și lucruri risipite pe drumurile imperiilor și dat...
https://zenodo.org/record/5877293#.YrnQ7BVBy3A
Papers by Constanta Vintila
Food&History, 2023
This article analyses the relation between food, social status and the circulation of knowledge i... more This article analyses the relation between food, social status and the circulation of knowledge in southeastern Europe. During the long eighteenth century, the mobility of people led to the circulation of culinary practices and information regarding the organization of meals and the spread of good manners. With the help of ego-documents, travel narratives and private archives I examine how the Christian elites in the Ottoman Empire adapted to the flux of new practices and fashions diffused through the intermediary of people, objects, gazettes and books. Together with recipes and new sorts of food, a whole set of utensils was borrowed and adapted to meet the new requirements. The civilizing process was long and difficult, and documentary and visual sources capture very well the delay between the circulation of objects and information, on the one hand, and their assimilation in the nineteenth century, through the generation of the revolutions, on the other
Revista Istorica, 2024
Our article analyses the dynamics of the order and disorder in the city of Bucharest during the P... more Our article analyses the dynamics of the order and disorder in the city of Bucharest during the Phanariot rule. We are interested in the urban policy created by the Phanariots before the city received an administrative and legislative framework, in the 1830s. This era of reforms, generated by the Organic Regulation, gave birth to the urban institutions designed to control sanitary, economic, social, and political facets of urban life. The article is based on the ordinances and nizams issued by the Phanariots with the aim to control and regulate urban life. To assess the implementation of these orders and their reception by the population, the article makes use of the cases kept in the judicial archives. These documents shed light on the daily practices of respecting the neighbourhoods and adhering to the rules of common coexistence. In a broader sense, we try to see which were the urban aspects subjected to regulation and their impact on the daily life of the population; determine who had the political authority necessary to enact city regulations and what kind of measure were taken to ensure that they were effective; assess how many of these measures met the requirements of communal living and how many were plagiarisms, replicating other measures; and understand to whom the decrees were addressed and the reasons for which the Phanariot rulers issued them.
Constanta Vintila, Changin Subjects, Moving Objects, 2022
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Constanta Vintila, Changing Subjects, Moving Objects, 2022
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Brill | Schöningh eBooks, May 4, 2022
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Chapte... more This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Chapter 2 Princely Secretary François-Thomas Linchou 'I beg you, my Lord, since this Greek is truly a rascal who is trying to slander my brother, who is a true Frenchman, to obtain from the Porte a counter-ferman ordering this Greek to be brought back to Constantinople, where my brother will appear without fail to make known the justice of his cause.'1 The words are those of François-Thomas Linchou, secretary to the prince of Wallachia, Constantin Racoviţă,2 and they are addressed to the French ambassador to the Porte, Charles Gravier comte de Vergennes. In 1752, Joseph Linchou, through the Linchou Company, entered into an association with the Greek candle-maker Sterio to set up a candle factory in Iaşi. The Linchou Company brought capital to this venture, while Sterio contributed his experience as a master candlemaker and his connections in the network of Moldavian guilds and in political circles. The venture never came to fruition, but it unleashed a major political, economic, and diplomatic scandal, which was to spread beyond the borders of Moldavia, involving the Ottoman Empire and France. Considerable correspondence was generated around this diplomatic dispute,3 correspondence that can help us to understand not only the status of foreigners in the Ottoman Principalities but also the manner in which individuals fashioned themselves and others according to their surroundings and immediate interests. Moreover, these insights allow us to see how symbolic or material resources (such as honour, prestige, gifts, and social networks) were handled on multiple social and political fronts in order to negotiate social status or membership within a specific social group. I am particularly interested in the metamorphoses undergone by the Linchou family in the course of a little over a century (between 1740 and 1850): from Linchou to Lenş and Linche de Moissac, between Marseilles, Istanbul, 1 'Je vous prie, Monseigneur, que, puisque ce Grec est un véritable coquin et qui cherche de faire une avanie à mon frère qui est véritable françois d'obtenir de la Porte un contre-firmanat qui ordonne de ramener ce Grec à Constantinople, où mon frère se rendra sans faute pour faire connoître la justice de sa cause.'
Brill | Schöningh eBooks, May 4, 2022
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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Books by Constanta Vintila
imperial boundaries in southeastern Europe at the beginning of the
modern age.
Through a series of life stories, which the author reconstructs with the
aid of many new sources, readers discover how certain men and women
defined and adapted their loyalties and affiliations, how they fashioned
their identities, how they enrolled their linguistic, political, economic,
and social resources to build a family and a career. Travelling between
Istanbul, Vienna, Trieste, Moscow, Bucharest, or Iaşi, individuals of
different backgrounds built their networks across borders, linking people
and objects and facilitating cultural transfer and material and social change.
https://zenodo.org/record/5877293#.YrnQ7BVBy3A
Papers by Constanta Vintila
imperial boundaries in southeastern Europe at the beginning of the
modern age.
Through a series of life stories, which the author reconstructs with the
aid of many new sources, readers discover how certain men and women
defined and adapted their loyalties and affiliations, how they fashioned
their identities, how they enrolled their linguistic, political, economic,
and social resources to build a family and a career. Travelling between
Istanbul, Vienna, Trieste, Moscow, Bucharest, or Iaşi, individuals of
different backgrounds built their networks across borders, linking people
and objects and facilitating cultural transfer and material and social change.
https://zenodo.org/record/5877293#.YrnQ7BVBy3A
ruled by Phanariot princes throughout the eighteenth century. These “Greeks”
were dragomans at the sultan’s court or high dignitaries of the Greek Orthodox
Patriarchate in Constantinople and governed the two Danubian Principalities in
the name of the sultan. My article examines how the local nobility, the Orthodox
elite of the countries, reacted and adapted to the Oriental ways of the Phanariot
courts. It reveals how the local elites adhered to the Phanariot political regimes
and tacitly adopted the new fashions and lifestyles, which would eventually be
instrumental in the fashioning of their identity. The available primary sources
consist of dowry lists, probate inventories, sumptuary laws, and visual documents
(engravings and prints published in travelogues, paintings, and costume books),
and they show in great detail the process of self-fashioning and self-display
through clothes and costumes.
Making use of the archive materials, visual sources and museum collections, the authors pointed out the richness of the region and the role of women in promoting new ideas of modernity. The information contained here will help the public to better know and understand the part of women's sociability in building new nations and constructing new identities along South-Eastern Europe and beyond.
In recent years, North American historiography assimilated the body to the growing field of cultural, gender, colonial and post-colonial studies moving away from “French theory”, social history and Western modernization. An increasing attention to the history of Empires and of European colonialisms has redefined the agenda of research looking beyond national histories towards cross-cultural encounters and transfers, exchanges, and processes of hybridity. In this framework and in nonwestern contexts, the body is the first site articulating the encounter between ethnicity, gender, religion and power. Bodies evoke disease and well-being, work and leisure, modes of gendered self-fashioning connected to status and age. They carry a variety of political, social and cultural meanings and encourage us to think beyond traditional divides of East and West, modern and traditional, religious and secular. What did the fashioning of a modern Ottoman culture of manners, dress, material comfort and health mean? Did it imply westernization and secularization or, to paraphrase Orhan Pamuk, was western influence just an affluent display that no one quite knew what it was good for?
Within this overall context, the workshop on Shaping the modern body. Fashion, Food, Health and Manners across South Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire (17th-19th centuries) opens a rich field of research in an under researched variety of sources. The body is the prism through which we intend to analyse four areas of historical enquiry and of social interactions: Manners and Behavior; Dress and Fashion; Food; Health. Private and public spaces, meetings and social events, mediators, translators and go-betweens provide an important backdrop to our focus on male and female bodies and the disciplining, feeding, clothing, healing practices that shaped and changed their self-perceptions, experiences and social identities. We aim to explore a set of sources ranging from costume books and portraits; inventories, correspondences and journals; books of etiquette, food and cosmetic recipes and medical prescriptions; photographs and magazines.
The conference shall revolve around three main topics:
I. Words of Common People and Words of the Elite
Is the language of trade and commercial exchange a purely “economic” one? Can we trace a specialized trade language in the archives? How are new fashions and manners reflected in language? Do translations alter the meanings of words and objects? How does the transfer into common language modify fashions, ideas or usage of objects? How did fashion, luxury and consumption influence language, as new terms were adopted and old words abandoned, along with the objects to which they referred?
II. Words of the „Self”
Words and objects shape/fashion a narrative of identity. Are there “European” models copied and followed by such narratives?
III. Words of Religions and Believers
The overlap between confessional and linguistic diversity a key theme of our conference. How was the religious discourse adapted when directed towards the common people?
IV. Words for Images
What is the relation between fashion, luxury self-fashioning and words in the context of the many images available from literary and artistic sources? South-Eastern Europe was not just a source of inspiration for Western artists, but also a market. Aristocrats and merchants commissioned portraits to hang up in their houses, and a number of Western painters arrived to meet the new demand. The Ottoman Empire also became a source of inspiration, and profit, for Orientalist painters who set out to discover the mysteries of the East. They spent time among the Christian and Muslim populations of these regions, obliged by history to live together, and painted the similarities and differences between them. What are the meanings of these portraits and images? What could they tell about people, objects and everyday life?
Words from the “Oriental” languages were adopted, whether they be Turkish or Greek, and then later words were taken over from Western languages, particularly from French, at or around the same time as the objects they define came into use; likewise, we propose to examine how older words were replaced, fell out of use entirely or changed their semantic content, especially in cases where it the semantic content] acquired a new pejorative meaning.
A comparative approach is crucial in understanding how words acquired their meanings in cultural transfers and the circulation of objects. The keywords of our conference are: luxury, consumption, fashion, social status, social identity, self-fashioning, material culture, Europeanization and modernization, secularization, ritual, confession and believers. This list is naturally open to new additions.