Matthias Roick

Matthias Roick is postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the History of Renaissance Knowledge of the Polish Acadamy of Sciences in Warsaw. He works within the framework of Prof. Valentina Lepri’s ERC project “From East to West, and Back Again: Student Travel and Transcultural Knowledge Production in Renaissance Europe (c. 1470 – c. 1620)”.

After his PhD in European history at the EUI in Florence, he worked at the University of Göttingen. From 2014 to 2021, he was an affiliated fellow of the Lichtenberg Kolleg, Göttingen’s Instititute for Advanced Studies, and Freigeist Fellow for the History of Ethics at the University of Göttingen. From 2022-2024, he worked as PASIFIC (MSC) Fellow on a project on early modern friendship.

He is the author of Pontano’s Virtues. Aristotelian Moral and Political Thought in the Renaissance (2017) and the co-editor of two recently published collected volumes, Teaching Ethics in Early Modern Universities, 1500-1700 (2021), together with Valentina Lepri and Danilo Facca, and Vera Amicitia. Classical Notions of Friendship in Renaissance Thought and Culture (2022), with Patrizia Piredda. Matthias has also widely published on different aspects of early modern ethics and virtue theory, including pieces on animal ethics, Petrarca’s moral self-fashioning, the virtue of magnificence, and the relationship.