 Reviews / ERSY  () – Jacqueline Glomski, Patronage and Humanist Literature in the Age of the Jagiellons: Court and Career in the Writings of Rudolf Agricola Junior, Valentin Eck and Leonard Cox (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ). xiv,  pp. ISBN ----. The elites of Renaissance Poland were, as generations of Polish historians have been since, extremely proud of their country’s humanist credentials, seeing these as evidence of its cultural sophistication, vigorous links with Italy and robustly European historical identity. Standard Polish histories of the University of Kraków (f. ) without hesitation define the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as a time of humanist ascendancy at the institution. For Henryk Barycz (), this was “the age of humanism” in the Polish capital, while for Józef Garbacik () it was the point at which the university became “a crucible of Renaissance learning and culture.”1 If the early sixteenth century was Poland’s much-vaunted “Golden Age,” a moment of dynastic triumph and geopolitical expansion under Zygmunt I Jagiellon (–), this must in turn, so the argument goes, have been accompanied by an appropriate artistic and intellectual flowering. Since the University of Kraków occupied an almost iconic status in Polish national historiography of the Renaissance, the city’s claims to be a hotbed of humanism have rarely been subjected to serious criticism or challenge. Patronage and Humanist Literature in the Age of the Jagiellons approaches the question of humanism both at Kraków and other cities in the Jagiellonian bloc from a new and fruitful angle, asking how hospitable international humanists really found these towns and courts. A scholar of Polish neo-Latin literature, Glomski takes as her subject three foreign humanists who travelled to Kraków in search of income, employment and glory—in short, patronage. The men trying “to convert themselves from outsiders to insiders,” Rudolf Agricola Junior (ca. –), Valentin Eck (–?) and Leonard Cox (ca. – ca. ), are identified by Glomski as the most prolific of the itinerant humanists active in early sixteenth-century Kraków, whose hagiographic verse, panegyric poetry, dedicatory letters, orations, and treatises on subjects as diverse as marriage and crusading passed through the printing presses of Johannes Haller, 1) Henryk Barycz, Historia Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w Epoce Humanizmu (Kraków: Nakładem Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, ); Józef Garbacik, “Ognisko nauki i kultury renesansowej (–),” in Dzieje Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w latach –, ed. K. Lepszy,  vols. (Kraków: Państwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, ), : –. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden,  DOI: 10.1163/027628509X12548459642263 Reviews / ERSY  () –  Hieronymus Vietor and Florian Ungler in Kraków and Vienna between  and ca. . Agricola Junior, having spent a peripatetic youth studying and teaching at Leipzig, Kraków, Esztergom and Vienna, briefly found success at Kraków, with a post at the university and an appointment as tutor to Queen Bona Sforza’s pageboys. Valentin Eck, also born on the shores of Lake Constance, graduated from Kraków in  and subsequently made his name in the Hungarian kingdom in Bartfa (Bardejov), as headmaster of the town school and sometime mayor. The Oxfordshire scholar Cox, meanwhile, taught and lectured at Kraków, Levoca and Kosice, before returning to England as headmaster of Reading School. The aim of this study is not simply to provide the first joint account of the experiences of Agricola Junior, Eck and Cox in Central Europe; its principal focus is the perennial, vexing question of the relationship between patronage and cultural production. Through close reading of a diverse body of early sixteenth-century printed matter (now widely scattered throughout European libraries from Budapest to Uppsala), Glomski examines the complex, always nuanced ways in which the output of Agricola Junior, Eck and Cox was shaped by the authors’ relations with their actual and putative patrons, by “the negotiation between the tastes of a powerful and wealthy elite and the pens of poor, scholarly Latinists” (). In , when a hopeful young Agricola Junior arrived in the capital on the Vistula, Central Europe was dominated by two great and flamboyant dynasties—the Habsburgs, who at that date ruled the Duchy of Austria, the Burgundian Netherlands and held the title of Holy Roman Emperor, and the Jagiellonians, who had successfully transformed themselves from pagan rulers of Lithuania into a Catholic regional hegemon, represented by Zygmunt I, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (–) and his older brother Władysław II, King of both Hungary (–) and Bohemia (– ). The first of these houses is infinitely better known in English-language scholarship than the second, and Glomski does a fine job in her opening chapter of setting the scene, guiding the reader through the geopolitical and cultural landscape of early sixteenth-century Central Europe, and introducing us to the dramatis personae (and potential patrons) of the courts of Kraków, Buda and Vienna, from ruling princes such as the cosmopolitan Zygmunt I, to bishops proud of their connections with Erasmus such as Piotr Tomicki of Kraków (d. ), to the scions of major banking houses, including the Turzos of Hungary. The relationship between author and patron, as revealed in this body of material, is discussed from a number of different angles in the various chapters.  Reviews / ERSY  () – In “Careerism at Cracow,” the self-presentation, self-promotion and indeed self-fashioning of the three scholars are explored, as Glomski dissects the dedicatory letters of Agricola, Eck and Cox. In “Hero-Making,” it is the image of the patron himself, as constructed in the panegyrical poetry of Agricola, Eck and Cox, which is under scrutiny. Glomski argues that in works such as Eck’s De antiquissima nominis et familiae Thurzonum origine (), or Cox’s verses in praise of Bishop Jan Konarski of Kraków (), the humanists glorify Central Europe’s dignitaries very much on their own terms, attributing classical virtues to them, placing particular laudatory emphasis on the subject’s support for the new learning and, in effect, publicly co-opting these elite figures as supporters of the humanist cause. As Glomski shows, by praising their patrons, they were promoting themselves. In these scholars’ output, the exultation of patron, author and the humanist program are all tightly enmeshed and constantly mutually reinforcing. Chapter Four, meanwhile, considers the ways in which Agricola, Eck and Cox found themselves drawn into the turbulent politics of early sixteenth-century Central Europe—as propagandists for the JagiellonianHabsburg Vienna summit of , for Poland’s dramatic victory over Muscovite forces at the Battle of Orsza in  and for the competing sides in the civil war which engulfed Hungary from . Behind the explicit political statements, these orations and verses also served as vehicles for promoting humanist studies; the medium was very much the message. Patronage and Humanist Literature is, for many reasons, a very valuable contribution to our knowledge of the intellectual culture of sixteenth-century Central Europe. The image of Kraków as a destination for itinerant humanists which emerges in this study is far more nuanced than in traditional scholarship. Glomski suggests that the support of Polish princes, courtiers, burghers and bishops for the new learning was ultimately limited, short-lived and perhaps tokenistic. She stresses the precarious nature of humanists’ positions, placing particular emphasis on the plaintive letters of Agricola Junior, who complained of the Polish climate and character, of his own abject poverty, the lack of meaningful elite support, and the unwelcome pressure from his episcopal supporters to take holy orders. It is the university itself, however, which she holds responsible for the demise of the humanist grouping active in Kraków between  and , as an institution which would not adapt to the new learning and froze out the hopeful young foreigners. Here, we are a long way from Barycz and Garbacik’s panegyrics to the humanist groups active in Kraków. One might wonder, however, how far the often gloomy experiences of Agricola, Eck and Cox in Renaissance Kraków were typical. Other foreign humanists made spectacular careers at the Jagiellonian court in the s. Reviews / ERSY  () –  The Alsatian Justus Ludovicus Decius (d. ), poet and historian, became secretary to Zygmunt I and a member of the Kraków town council, growing affluent enough to construct his own Renaissance villa on the outskirts of the city, while the notable neo-Latin poet Johannes Dantiscus (d. ), son of a Danzig merchant, rose to become one of Zygmunt I’s principal diplomats, his services rewarded with royal nomination to the bishopric of Chełmno (Kulm) in .2 Glomski’s study marks a significant departure from traditional treatments of humanism in Central Europe in its willingness to adopt a broad, regional perspective. Whereas the activities of Agricola, Eck and Cox have been noted within individual national historical traditions, Glomski follows these men across early modern frontiers, treating Jagiellonian and Habsburg Poland, Hungary, Bohemia and Austria as an organic cultural whole, in a way which is surely truer to the experiences of her subjects and a more accurate reflection of the self-consciously international, peripatetic nature of early sixteenth-century humanism. Patronage and Humanist Literature is also a salutary reminder to anyone working with sixteenth-century printed books that their front-matter, the seemingly generic flattering letters and saccharine verses, repays (and withstands) close, meticulous analysis. These texts, in Glomski’s treatment, emerge as both bold and poignant, painting an idealized, fictional reality in which humanist values triumph, virtuous princes rule and scholars of the new learning emerge as a new elite, although they were in practise penned by disappointed men struggling to make a living and, in the case of Agricola Junior, destined to die in penury. Behind the frothy, upbeat rhetoric, there lay bitter personal dilemmas and crises. This book is particularly important, then, because it adds a significant monograph to the currently piecemeal, largely episodic body of scholarship in English on Central European humanism.3 Its subject has been largely ignored in textbook surveys of Renaissance humanism, which typically and tacitly limit themselves to Western Europe in their coverage. Glomski’s work, in recreating the intellectual world of the Jagiellonian capitals and using Polish and Hungarian case-studies to address big questions about the reality of humanists’ 2) Maria Cytowska, “Justus Ludovicus Decius,” COE : –; Ilse Guenther, “Johannes Dantiscus,” COE : . 3) Harold Segel, Renaissance Culture in Poland: The Rise of Humanism, – (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ); Samuel Fiszman, ed., The Polish Renaissance in its European Context (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ).  Reviews / ERSY  () – careers, not only offers a means of remedying this blind-spot but demonstrates why Central Europe belongs squarely in the mainstream of early modern cultural history and not on its margins as a form of colorful exotica. Natalia Nowakowska Somerville College, University of Oxford