Connecting the Renaissance: Italy and East Central Europe (1300-1600)

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 rivaled 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 the 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 that 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.

Leslie Carr-Riegel studied at Kalamazoo College, USA, before transferring to complete her BA at the American University in Rome. She took her first MA from the University of Durham before completing her second MA and PhD at the Central European University. She has worked as a teaching fellow at the Princeton University Global History Lab and was a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Legal Unity and Pluralism.”

Anna Horeczy is an assistant professor in the Department of Early Modern Studies at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. Her research interests focus on the reception of Italian intellectual culture in late medieval and early modern Poland and book and manuscript studies.

Michael T. LoPiano received his PhD in history and Renaissance studies from Yale University in 2022 and his BA in history and Italian from Johns Hopkins University in 2015. He is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Cyprus, where his research focuses on the reception of the Tablet of Cebes (Πίναξ) in Latin Europe during the period 1500–1850.

Adam Zapała is the head of the Digital History Lab in the Department of Historical Atlas of the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences in Poland. His research interests focus on contacts between Poles and the Holy See in the second half of the fifteenth century, as well as on the impact of digital tools on historical research.