ABSTRACT

In 1566 Łukasz Górnicki, a humanist and royal secretary to the Polish king Sigismund Augustus, published his Dworzanin polski (The Polish Courtier), an adaptation of Castiglione’s famous book, a bestseller that had already been translated into French, Spanish, English, German, and Latin. Like his contemporary Jan Kochanowski – another major Polish humanist who would achieve fame in this very same period – Górnicki played a major role in the introduction of Italian humanist ideas and practices to Poland. Yet, as we shall see, Górnicki and Kochanowski, despite the fact that they had studied in Padua and moved in overlapping circles of scholars and courtiers in both Italy and Poland, developed humanist practices and their understanding of language and its expression in fundamentally different ways. The transmission of humanist learning to Poland, in short, was shaped both by individual differences in temperament and experience as well as by certain fundamental tensions within European culture more broadly.