Connecting the Renaissance

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.