One thing from this chapter that I found interesting was the idea of wealth. “Times have changed, and now riches, so essential for any important enterprise, are in order for whoever can acquire them. Priests are allowed to amass all the wealth they want; they only have to be poor in spirit. To want high priests actually to be poor, rather than the immensely rich men they are, displays a kind of ‘mindlessness’” (Page 140) I found this interesting because the statement kind of betrays the morals of priests and how they seem to be “mindless”. Another thing that I found interesting was how Poggio dealth with sickness. In the text it states “One way that Poggio dealt with the sickness … was through laughter, the abrasive, obscene laughter of the Facetiae” (Page 147). Facetiae means jokes in latin. This was interesting to me because the text claims Poggio used comedy to explore new moral ideas. Most of his jokes were about sex and it was seen as a “moral outrage”
One text to world connection to this chapter is when Poggio is calling out his rival humanist, Filelfo, he writes about him and uses explanatory notes to really make sure the readers understood that he was the “bastard priest” in the story. This connects to now because online there are hundreds of music artists that name drop each other in songs and write things about them that they want other people to know.
One question I still have on this chapter is why was Poggio so self conscious about the letters he had written to Niccoli in 1449? (Page 152-153)
