Please note that the event is cancelled and will be held at a later date.
The CEU Democracy Institute’s Democracy in History Workgroup launched a public lecture series to bring together international as well as local scholars of history and related fields in Budapest as well as online to exchange their results on the interplay between democracy and histor(iograph)y in a broad sense. The series’ title honors the legacy of historian Jenő Szűcs, an advocate of recognizing Central Europe as a historical region and a major critic of the misuses of national past in his native Hungary.
Zoom link will be sent to registered participants, please register here.
Abstract:
Becoming a burgher of a town in the medieval and early modern period was always a matter of balance between what a town could offer in exchange of what a newcomer’s added value was, a kind of balance of supplies and demands. And fulfilling the criteria was a process, a personal process as well as an administrative one. The lecture aims to present the proceedings of gaining citizenship in a town, starting with the must-precondition of liberation from the authority of an overlord, thus becoming a free person, up to the possibilities a citizenship might have bestowed on townspeople. Several topics will be tangentially discussed, such as migration, mobility, crafts or even marriage strategies with examples from the history of the town Cluj/Kolozsvár, and a special focus will be set on archival materials that can be used in these types of research.
Speaker:
Ágnes Flóra studied history and art history in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) at the Babeș-Bolyai University, followed by an MA and PhD training in Medieval Studies at the Central European University in Budapest, where she defended her PhD thesis in 2014. The dissertation called The Matter of Honour. The Leading Urban Elite in Sixteenth Century Transylvania was published in 2019 by Brepols. She currently works at the Romanian National Archives in Cluj and teaches Archival Sciences at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj. Her major field of interest is medieval and early modern urban history, development of urban governments, formation of elites and urban identity.