Suchergebnisse

The following article, a translation of an essay by Romanian historian David Prodan, summarizes his research concerning three and a half centuries of serfdom in Transylvania, a subject on which he has worked in minute detail for fifty years. The essay presents a global image of the Transylvanian variant of European serfdom, a variant that shows serfdom in its gravest form–that of personal servitude, in which the peasant is bound to both the lord and the soil–and considers how this bondage came about. In this brief introduction, I will place the essay within the context of Academician Prodan's writings and of other work on serfdom in Eastern Europe.