Segretario

Segretario is a picaresque historical novel. Its Italian title points to a relationship between the two main protagonists. The eponymous secretary of the Italian humanist, poet and diplomat at the court of the Polish kings, is young Gredechin from Heidelberg. This incredibly ambitious and smart girl uses a male costume, since pretending to be a boy is the only way she can study medicine in Kraków. To support herself, she starts working as a secretary to a guest from Tuscany, Filippo Buonaccorsi, known in Latin as Callimachus. The novel contains twelve letters sent by Gredechin from Kraków to Heidelberg between June and November 1496. The Kraków student describes her adventures to her childhood friend; she also talks widely about the life of Callimachus, which forms a biography of this figure, so significant in the history of Polish culture and politics. It’s worth mentioning that this is a very colourful biography, full of Callimachus’s tempestuous affairs and clashes with aristocracy. At the same time, we get a portrait of the city – the multicultural capital of the Jagiellonian state; and at a very particular point in time. The Middle Ages have come to an end in the Polish lands; in their place a new formation appears: the Renaissance. Hen describes the sprouting intellectual and artistic trends in attractive way, he also writes about the civilisational changes of that era, showing what the Kraków Academy was in the years of its biggest eminence, radiating all across Europe. Like every contemporary historical novel, Segretario discusses themes that are quite current. The most important one might be transgressing various lines: cultural, linguistic, social or even religious. In Hen’s view, the world at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can provide a lot of important inspiration to us, for example, to do with the cult of science or the universal significance of the main ideas of humanism.