Yugoslav literature: Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Ecclesiastical works in Old Church Slavonic were produced in the Middle Ages. Under Turkish and later Austrian domination a large body of orally transmitted folk poetry of great richness developed. The remarkable 16th-century flowering of learning and literature in the Adriatic trading city of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) was a reflection of the Italian Renaissance, spread by commercial contacts and by Slavic youths educated at Padua. It reached its apogee in Osman, the Croatian epic by Ivan Gundulić, and in the plays of Marin Držić (1508?–1567) and Junije Palmotić (1606–57).

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