Short description:

Why did Italian culture come to occupy such privileged status and interest among the societies of East-Central Europe during the period 1300–1600? Two centuries after 1300, East-Central Europe was saturated with Italianate forms that rivalled the most sophisticated centers of the High Renaissance.

Long description:

Why did Italian culture come to occupy such privileged status and interest among the societies of East-Central Europe during the period 1300–1600?  In 1300 East-Central Europe regarded Italy not necessarily as an undisputed center of cultural emulation but drew from a much wider range of models centered in France, Germany, and even Kievan Rus’. Two centuries later the same region was saturated with Italianate forms – architecture, humanism, diplomacy, commerce, and print – that rivalled the most sophisticated centers of the High Renaissance.

This volume argues that the transformation was neither passive reception nor mere “Italianism.” Rather, East-Central-European societies deliberately appropriated, hybridized, and reinterpreted Italian practices and values specifically to achieve their own political, economic, and intellectual aims and meet an array of regional challenges.

Ranging in focus from fourteenth-century Italian mining practices to digital Latin corpus analysis, diplomatic history, and early print studies, together the chapters in this volume present nine case studies which draw on a number of methodologies, new sources, and fresh archival research that all advance an understanding of this important and complex phenomenon. This book is a vital reading for scholars of cultural transfer, early modern studies, and East–Central European history more broadly.

Table of Contents:

List of Contributors

Introduction

Michael LoPiano

Chapter 1

Little Genoa – The First Italian Community in Poland

Leslie Carr-Riegel

Chapter 2

From Padua to Kraków: Niccolò Bonavia’s De laudibus sancti Hieronymi and Its Manuscript Afterlife

Anja Božič

Chapter 3

A Polish Bishop on the Italian Chessboard: Renaissance Diplomatic Patterns in Zbigniew Oleśnicki’s Struggle for Cardinalate Confirmation

Adam Zapała

Chapter 4

John of Capestrano and his Spiritual Networks: the Case of Bohemia

Antonín Kalous and Petra Mutlová

Chapter 5

The Humanist Library of Jan Długosz (1415-1480). An Attempt at Reconstruction

Zdzisław Koczarski

Chapter 6

Connecting the Italian Humanist Literary Circle to Poland: The Case of Callimachus, Conrad Celtis, and the Origins of the Sodalitas Litteraria Vistulana

Michael LoPiano

Chapter 7

Aldine Prints in Kraków at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century as Vehicles of Cultural Transfer

Anna Horeczy

Chapter 8

From Queen to Deceived Bride – Beatrice of Aragon's Struggle to Become the Wife of Vladislaus II Jagiellon

Hajnalka Kuffart

Chapter 9

Ippolito I d’Este’s Episcopal Court in Eger (1498–1520)

Ilona Kristóf

Index