Connecting the Renaissance: Italy and East Central Europe (1300-1600) (Routledge Research in Early Modern History)

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 his