[4] The diocese's early development has been characterized as follows: the 16th century involved founding and consolidating; the 17th, acquiring a distinct identity and beginning its contributions to the national culture; and the 18th was its time of great contributions to Romanian culture and spirituality, leading Nicolae Iorga to speak of Râmnic as the typographers' capital and others to evoke a "golden age" for the town and the diocese during this century.
Too, Vlad the Grammarian and Alexander the Teacher, brought from Bistrița at the end of the 17th century by Bishop Ilarion, copying several important books under his guidance and heading his school.
In 1726, a textbook of his, including prayers, liturgical texts and church music, was printed posthumously, followed in 1749 under Bishop Grigorie Socoteanu by a spelling book.
Finally, during the 19th century (1800–1831), there was a Romanian school characterized by a certain amount of variation in curriculum and teachers' pay, unsurprising given the transitions of the period.
[7] Fourth, the diocese made contributions to the development of Romanian religious art during more than four centuries, including the period when the Severin Metropolis was located at Râmnic.
In terms of religious architecture, this evolved in the area from peasant models to distinct church forms to the integration of an Athonite trefoil style and its local permutations, followed by the development of an indigenous architecture under Matei Basarab, then the flowering of the Brâncovenesc style followed, in the 18th century, by its extension into Baroque, Mannerist and rural trends.
While paintings in church naves remained in harmony with canon law, artists adopted realistic forms in the vestibules, where the ktitori were depicted.
[9] Finally, the church singers' schools attached to the larger monasteries and to the cathedral, which trained future priests and deacons, including from Transylvania, played an important role in developing medieval music in the Romanian lands.
[10] Fifth, at a time when the country was emerging from the medieval period and was faced with the spread of Catholic and Protestant ideas, the diocese promoted the printed word as a means of enshrining Orthodox identity and unity of belief.
Their importance lies in the fact that with their completion, most Orthodox sacred texts had now appeared in Romanian, advancing the process of making the liturgical language a vernacular one and legitimizing Romanian as a sacred language, a process begun by Coresi, Dosoftei and Mitrofan of Buzău and continued through further translations by his successor Bishop Damaschin.
As part of their political and cultural strategy, Constantin Brâncoveanu and Metropolitan Teodosie disseminated Anthim's texts to Romanians in Transylvania, subject to official attempts to convert them to Western Christianity.
[11] In the 18th century, the bishops of Râmnic, witnessing two decades of Austrian domination and a number of Austro-Turkish confrontations in Oltenia, visibly acquired a national identity and a feeling of cultural, linguistic and religious cohesion with other Romanians.
This helps explain why in their town more than in the national capital Bucharest, where Ottoman pressures and the financial interests of Phanariote Princes and dignitaries restricted such sentiments, printing activity in Romanian was done with the intention of aiding the popular masses, and why in spite of the difficulties involved, they strove to preserve traditional cultural and spiritual ties to areas inhabited by Romanians.
In turn, a number of typographers assisted their efforts, including a printing dynasty founded by Athanasie Popovici Râmniceanul and several who also worked in Blaj, Sibiu and Bucharest.
When Iorga referred to the town as a typographers' capital, he took into account the quantity and quality of religious and didactic works that appeared; their wide distribution in the three historic Romanian provinces as well as south of the Danube and on Mount Athos; the large number of scholars and proofreaders, but especially of talented printers, who handed down their craft from father to son and were sought out to work in other centers of learning.
The traditions of spiritual, cultural and artistic life were continued, with war-damaged churches repaired and new ones built in a manner that balanced a post-Brâncovenesc style with folk art innovations.
His successor Nectarie rebuilt the press, turning out twenty books, including a collection of sermons in Bulgarian for that country's believers; he followed as metropolitan in 1812.
)[17] Bishop Calinic (1850–1868), whose reign coincided with the formation of the modern Romanian state, was the diocese's pre-eminent leader during the 19th century; his successors did not rise to the same spiritual level and were privy to the definitive imposition of government authority upon the church.
[18] Calinic set up his own press and published a number of liturgical and spiritual books, including a lamentation in verse, a collection of advice for monks and a chronicle on the Wallachian uprising of 1821.
[17] Finally, local writers began to look beyond the confines of the diocese, dealing with themes of national interest and making themselves known in the Romanian cultural and literary scene of the day.
In 1990, after the fall of the regime, the Argeș and Muscel Diocese was re-established, leaving Râmnic in charge of Vâlcea and Olt counties.