One interesting thing that I found while reading this chapter was how Cossa and the schism between the church had tried to resolve things. In the text it states “Each combined attempts to seize the moral high ground with thuggish tactics. Each had powerful allies but also strategic weaknesses that made achieving unity through military conquests impossible. Everyone understood that the situation was intolerable”: (Page 160). I felt this was interesting because there was no way they could resolve everything through fighting it out because there were too many strategic weaknesses. Another thing that I found interesting was the idea that Jan Hus would have guaranteed safe conduct and then never got it. For example on page 167 it states “The safe-conduct, bearing the large imperial seal, promised ‘protection and safeguard’ and requested that Hus be allowed ‘freely and securely’ to pass, sojourn, stop and return’”. Yet on page 168 it states “Notwithstanding their assurances that the pope, the council, and the emperor had given him, Hus was almost immediately vilified and denied the opportunity to speak in public”. This resulted in him starving, and chained up for over 2 months.
One text to world connection I made while reading Chapter 7 was, how Poggio wanted to find, as he stated, “human voices” instead of manuscripts. I made the connection between how Poggio wanted real human interaction instead of reading words from the past, to how people in this day and age are glued to their phones and instead of having interactions with one another they text or communicate through their screens.
One question I still have about the chapter is, who starved and chained up Han in the Gottlieben Castle on the Rhine?
