A Polish Envoy in England: Five Hundredth Anniversary of Ioannes Dantiscus’s Visit to ‘a very dear Island’
Apanel discussion featuring the digital repository 'Corpus of Ioannes Dantiscus’ Texts and Correspondence: Opportunities and Perspectives'.
Speakers:
- Piotr Wilczek
- Norman Davies
- Anna Skolimowska
- Howard Hotson
Five hundred years ago, the first Polish diplomat was sent by the King of Poland Sigismund I to the Court of King Henry VIII. Who was this man and what was the purpose of this diplomatic mission? A Polish Envoy in England – Five Hundredth Anniversary of Ioannes Danticus’s Visit to ‘a very dear Island’, a project of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in London together with The Warburg Institute, aims to address these questions. This project hopes to bring to the wider public the story of the Renaissance scholar, humanist and diplomat Ioannes Dantiscus (1485 – 1548) to mark the five hundredth anniversary of Dantiscus’s diplomatic mission to England and to discuss the wider value and importance of diplomacy.
A distinguished diplomat at the Polish court, bishop of Chełmno and of Warmia, Ioannes Dantiscus (1485-1548) was an acclaimed author of Neo-Latin poetic compositions who maintained contact with numerous prominent personalities of his times. He corresponded, among many others, with the ‘Prince of the Humanists’, Desiderius Erasmus, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, the Praeceptor Germaniae Philip Melanchthon, and Nicolaus Copernicus, who formulated the heliocentric model of the Solar System. Dantiscus’s correspondence, of which more than 6,100 letters are extant, alongside his other texts, has been researched and systematically published online as part of the project titled Corpus of Ioannes Dantiscus’ Texts and Correspondence, carried out at the University of Warsaw over the past thirty years. This panel aims to present the structure of this digital repository and discuss the possibilities of how to explore this valuable resource.
