Ecclesiastical Pressures and Language Politics: The Boundary Work of Albanian Language in the 17th-18th Centuries

2022/04/19 by Albert Doja · 5 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics #Classical Studies and Philology #Philippine History and Culture #Politics #Enlightenment #Opposition (politics) #Evangelism #Sociology #History #Linguistics #Literature #Aesthetics #Philosophy #Epistemology #Political science #Law #Religious studies #Art

paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/nps.2021.55

published in Nationalities Papers 50(4), 742-769 (Cambridge University Press)

openalex publication_date 2022/04/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/26

Abstract

Abstract In this article, I examine early religious literature in the Albanian language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which, in combination with ecclesiastical rivalries and a differential opposition to Ottoman rule, must have promoted an inherent cultural process of differentiation, especially between Greek-speaking and Albanian-speaking Orthodox Christians. In particular, I argue that the contradicting motivations of political contradistinction, Enlightenment propagation, Orthodox evangelism, ecclesiastical confrontation, and missionary counteraction lead inadvertently to a boundary work of the social reorganization of linguistic and cultural difference.

Citations

• Albanian literature in Greek script. The eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Orthodox tradition in Albanian writing
• The Politics of Religion in the Reconstruction of Identities
• Further Considerations on the Politics of Religious Discourse: Naim Frashëri and his Pantheism in the Course of Nineteenth-Century Albanian Nationalism
• The politics of religious dualism: Naim Frashëri and his elective affinity to religion in the course of 19th-century Albanian activism

Cited by

• Dionysios Skylosophos [wikipedia]
• Epirus revolt of 1611 [wikipedia]

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