It was only after I put ‘Stephen Greenblatt on Jerome of Prague’ on my blog that it occurred to me to look at Google, what, if anything, can be found on Jerome on the internet. I found two extensive entries on Wikipedia, one in Czech and one in English. I learnt that Poggio Braccioli’s letter to Leonardo Bruni concerning Jerome is well known.
I thought of revising or simply
cancelling my post on Greenblatt’s Jerome, but on second thoughts I decided to
leave it as it stands. Greenblatt’s account has a freshness and authenticity of
an author who thought about Poggio’s account of Jerome’s greatness in a new
way.
In the Czech Wikipedia entry on Jerome
I learnt that during his stay in Paris at Sorbonne, in the year 1404/05, ‘he
got acquainted with the whole of Plato’.
Having read all this within the
framework of Greenblatt’s The Swerve HOW THE RENAISSANCE BEGAN I can’t
help thinking that Jerome would deserve to be written about under the heading
HOW THE RENAISSANCE IN BOHEMIA WAS UNTIMELY ENDED. Had Hus and Jerome continued
working at Charles’ University, a renaissance could have developed in Bohemia within
the framework of and on the basis of their critical thinking.
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