Preliminary communication
Correspondence of Šime Ljubić and Franjo Rački
Tihana Luetić
Abstract
In this work there is published the extant correspondence of Šime Ljubić and Franjo Rački from archival funds containing their legacies in the State Archive of Zadar and the Archive of Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb.
After an introductory part, in which the previous scholarship on their correspondence and the circumstances of the period when it was written are briefly described, in this article their letters to each other are published in full text and with commentaries on persons and facts mentioned in them and explanations of unclear or insufficiently defined places.
All together, there are 23 letters of Šime Ljubić addressed to Franjo Rački and 6 letters of the latter to the former, describing several details regarding their scholarly activity, especially that of Ljubić, when writing to Rački – at that time an already established scholar and public person – with several requests and questions. This set of details, linked to his employment in the gymnasium of Rijeka, problems connected to editing and printing source collections of documents from foreign archives, and publishing of his own books and articles, as well as his election as a member of the newly founded Academy and his employment in the National Museum in Zagreb, his attitude towards his collaborators, his comments on other recent scholarly publications and so on, help to complete the image of Šime Ljubić as an indefatigable scholar in the field of editing historical sources.
This, hitherto unpublished, correspondence between Ljubić and Rački is a valuable source for more detailed study of mutual co-operation and scholarly activity of these two important Croatian scholars and cultural agents of the second half of the nineteenth century, who were, with a handful of others, major founders of modern historiographical thought, especially of its placing on scholarly foundations.
Keywords
Šime Ljubić; Franjo Rački; cultural history; historiography; the nineteenth century
Hrčak ID:
9398
URI
Publication date:
1.3.2003.
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