Abstract
The aim of this contribution is to underline the reception process in Transylvania of policies laid down by the Centre with reference to setting up local printing houses and the extent to which printing and publishing houses in the monarchy were capable of filling Romanian (Saxon and possibly Hungarian) people’s need for books in the eighteenth century Transylvania. The first significant deed through which the Habsburg regime exerted an important influence on the political, religious and cultural life of Romanians in Transylvania was the Leopold's Diploma of 4th December 1691, as well as the Diploma of 1699 and 1701, through which this geographic space became part of the monarchy. It aimed at subordinating Transylvanian institutions, including the cultural and ecclesiastical evolution, to Habsburg laws. As a follow-up to this first step towards centralized government, the subsequent regulations will influence directly the production of books both in Romanian and Latin, German and Hungarian. These two directions will follow the line of the reforms initiated by Maria Theresia and later on by Joseph II. Through the emergence of the ban on books imports from Moldavia and Walachia (in 1746), the Romanian printing house in Blaj was set up in 1747, under the patronage of the Viennese Court, which will endow Romanian schools and libraries with school manuals and religious books. The representatives of printing houses in Sibiu, Martin Hochmeister, Petrus and Johannes Bart, followed by Ioan Bart, will continue to get involved in the process of book production in Transylvania and will obtain benefits and privileges from the Court, in order to print school manuals and other books. They managed to print books both for the German speaking community as well as for the Romanian one. On the other hand, after the University and the printing house in Trnava (Slovakia) were relocated to Budapest, the interest of Romanian intellectuals shifted towards this printing house, where Romanians worked as reviewers and proofreaders for the Romanian language and where important works for the modern Romanian culture and civilization were published. Even in the centre of the Empire, in Vienna, Johann Thomas von Trattnern will print in 1774, following the spirit of reform, for Romanian Orthodox Christians, in German, together with other works, instructions and regulations concerning the organisation of educational structures and the content of education in the empire. Since the summer of 1771 until 1790, the nobleman Joseph Laurenz Kurzböck had produced in the imperial printing house, with a view to education and training, bilingual Romanian-German manuals, in Romanian with Cyrillic characters, as well as some ecclesiastical books, also with an educational purpose. Our research on cultural policies and of some principles laid down by imperial circles in Vienna, concerning the activity of Romanian printing houses in eighteenth century Transylvania, even at this stage, plead for the instrumentalisation of book production, which had become a genuine “instrumentum regni” for the consolidation of Habsburg reign on the Principality of Transylvania.

Keywords
Transylvania, printers, Viennese imperial reforms, privileges, Romanian language, culture.