‘Why Did You Go to Buda?’: The Humanist Sodality and Mantuan’s Rustic Idyll in Bohuslaus of Hassenstein’s <i>Ecloga sive Idyllion Budae</i> (1503) ^☆

Abstract In the late fifteenth century, the Hungarian royal court at Buda was home to a cosmopolitan community of humanists. In early modern historiography, this cultural milieu has often been interpreted as one of the new, emergent ‘centres’ of the Renaissance in East Central Europe. This article responds to this framework by shedding light on a more peripheral figure: the Bohemian poet Bohuslaus of Hassenstein. Focusing on his Ecloga sive Idyllion Budae (1503), I follow Hassenstein’s journey from the Hungarian court at Buda to his homeland of Bohemia, where he used the resources of the pastoral tradition, both classical and Italian, to transplant and cultivate the values of Latin humanism. In addition to Virgil, I examine Hassenstein in dialogue with Mantuan, who published a bestselling collection of Latin eclogues, the Adolescentia, in 1498. As a case study in the popular Renaissance genre of the neo‐Latin eclogue, this article shows how the pastoral tradition empowered poets like Hassenstein to transform the cultural peripheries in which they found themselves into new centres.