Classical Antiquity in the Franciscan Historiography of Bosnia (Eighteenth Century)

This chapter surveys the key historiography works created by the Franciscans of the eighteenth‐century province Bosnia Argentina. In many segments, these works grafted upon late humanist and early neoclassical traditions and their reception of classical antiquity. The chapter examines the details of these influences and attempts to explain the trends of their use by the Bosnian Franciscans, focusing on sources and themes that appear in these works, as well as literary, language, and historiography tools that exploit or evoke classical antiquity, particularly its Roman Latin tradition. Contextualizing these trends with the important circumstances of the local history—Ottoman rule, Franciscan divisions within the province Bosnia Argentea, and the close links of the Order with their local congregation—shows how references to the Latin West helped shape the national identity and perceptions of the local Catholics as Croats. The implanting of the Roman Latin tradition into scholarly study that resulted from the arrival of the Austro‐Hungarians (1878) is discussed, as well as the banishment and degradation of this scholarship, both secular and religious, during the communist regime and the destructions of the conflict of the 1990s.