Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Bushkovitch, Paul
Abstract
This dissertation approaches the question which follows: who was the first Renaissance humanist in the Polish Crown Lands? As such, it attempts to reconcile the scholarly debate across a number of linguistic traditions regarding the identity and origin of the humanist movement in East Central Europe. It principally focuses on the Tuscan humanist Filippo Buonaccorsi (Callimachus Experiens) and his biography of Archbishop Grzegorz of Sanok entitled the Vita et mores Gregorii Sanocei. It examines the literary structure and form of the biography to assess Buonaccorsi’s claims regarding the origins of humanism in the Polish Crown Lands and evaluates these claims using the material evidence of the humanistic manuscript record, epistolary and poetic evidence, and the facsimiles of the now lost originals of the Bernardine Archive in Lwów (L’viv, Ukraine). Ultimately, it argues for an understanding of humanism’s origins in the region to lie in the social role crafted by Buonaccorsi through his biography of and relationship with Grzegorz of Sanok.
Recommended Citation
Lo Piano, Michael Thomas, "Virtue Signals: Narrative, Self-Transformation, and Behavioral Exemplarity in XV-Century Italian Renaissance Humanist Biography in Poland and Ukraine" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 808.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/808