Beyond the Individual: Renaissance Dalmatia’s Intellectuals as a Socio-Functional Group

This essay offers insights into Renaissance Dalmatia’s intellectual elites by focusing, first, on individual experiences to derive, second, general trends about their socio-economic group behaviour. While these include known individuals like Brne Karnarutić, Federik Grisogono, and Šime Budinić, the author argues that we should also include their less-prominent neighbours to arrive at a fuller understanding of their activities throughout, and in some cases beyond, the Venetian Adriatic, thereby revealing new insights into the private lives of Dalmatia’s intellectuals, including interpersonal and spatial ties. Based on original research of primary sources preserved in the Croatian State Archives in Zadar, new insights into a field of research dominated by Renaissance Dalmatia’s urban elites are gained by widening the scope of enquiry and by including differentiations such as class, education, and gender to identify behavioural patterns.