Jan Władysław Woś

Jan Władysław Woś was born in Warsaw on 19 April 1939 and attended the Hugo Kołłątaj secondary school there from 1954 to 1958, a period he later described in a published memoir. After completing teacher training he worked for two years in schools as a teacher and librarian.

From 1962 he studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw, where his teachers included Leszek Kołakowski, Zygmunt Bauman, Adam Schaff and Janina Kotarbińska. He graduated in 1967 with a thesis on the philosophical system of Dante. In October 1967 he went to Italy on a scholarship and continued his studies at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, the Catholic University of Louvain, in Florence under Eugenio Garin, and at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he completed a doctoral diploma in medieval and humanist philology with the highest marks. He was later a fellow of the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in West Germany, working in Bonn and Heidelberg.

Woś taught the medieval history of Eastern Europe at the University of Pisa from 1976 to 1987, where he also lectured on Polish literature and culture to students of Slavic studies. In 1985 and 1986 he taught at the University of Heidelberg. From 1987 until his retirement in 2008 he was professor of the history of Eastern Europe at the University of Trento, and in 1990 and 1991 he also lectured at the University of Venice.

His research focused on sixteenth century Poland, the history of the Catholic Church and Polish and Italian relations. He edited sources such as the letters of the papal nuncio Annibale di Capua and the travel account of Giovanni Paolo Mucante, which contains the oldest known description of Warsaw as a capital, dating from 1596. He wrote around 800 articles, reviews and books, mostly in Italian, and broadcast a series on the history of the Church in Poland on Vatican Radio in the 1980s.

In Trento he founded the Italy-Poland Cultural Association and a documentation centre and specialist library on Eastern European history. He was a member of the Historical and Literary Society in Paris and the Polish Society of Arts and Sciences Abroad in London. After retiring he wrote short stories, essays and exhibition reports in Polish for literary magazines such as Twórczość, Akcent and Odra, two volumes of memoirs, and published extracts from his diaries.

Woś became an Italian citizen in 1987 while remaining closely tied to Polish culture and the Polish community in Italy. He was a dedicated bibliophile and collector, gathering old maps of Poland and Europe, engravings relating to Poland and Poles, eastern carpets, and Latin, Greek and Hebrew parchment documents from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. He took part in anthropological expeditions to Africa and the Amazon basin. He kept a diary from September 1955 onwards, and he spent his last years in the countryside near Florence.

Jan Władysław Woś died on 3 November 2026 at the age of 87. Italian Wikipedia gives the place of death as Florence. His death was announced by the Honorary Consulate of the Republic of Poland in Florence and Tuscany, and reported the next day by the news site Polacy we Włoszech, which called him a person greatly respected in the European academic and intellectual world and a respected representative of the Polish community in Italy. The cause of death was not made public. His funeral was arranged for 5 November 2026 at 3.30 pm at the church of San Romito in Piazza Baldinucci, Florence.

Woś is remembered as a bridge between Polish and Italian scholarship, whose editions of Vatican and diplomatic sources opened up the history of Poland and the Church to Italian readers. Collections of essays in his honour were published for his 50th, 60th and 70th birthdays, and two commemorative medals bearing his portrait were struck in 1989 and 1992. He was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1999 and an honorary doctorate from the Polish University Abroad in London in 2002.