Communication

A communication will be considered only if it relates to an article or review published in this journal; publication is solely at the editor's discretion. The AHA disclaims responsibility for statements, either of fact or opinion, made by the writers. Letters may not exceed seven hundred words for reviews and one thousand words for articles. They should be submitted in duplicate, typed double-spaced with wide margins, and headed "To the Editor."

ARTICLES

To the Editor:
Even though I am not a specialist on medieval history, I do enjoy reading on this subject because I teach survey courses on Central European and Slovak history. That is why I eagerly read Daniel Hobbins's excellent article "The Schoolman as Public Intellectual: Jean Gerson and the Late Medieval Tract" (/journals/ahr/108.5/hobbins.html). As I read the article, I was reminded of another "public intellectual" who was a contemporary of Jean Gerson and who also wrote in the vernacular for lay audiences and reached a wide public. I am referring to Jan Hus, who was rector of Charles University in Prague. Because he shared so many similarities with Gerson, I kept looking for some mention of him, especially since Gerson participated in the Council of Constance, which found Hus guilty of heresy and sentenced him to death. Alas, I could not find a single mention of Hus, not even in a footnote.
I suppose that we should not blame Daniel Hobbins for this oversight. After all, he was educated in the United States, which has always shown an inordinate interest in the history of England and France but very little in Central and Eastern Europe. I guess that American intellectuals agree with Voltaire that the further east one goes in Europe, the more barbaric it becomes. How, then, do American intellectuals explain the most important invention of the past millennium—the printing press—in Central Europe? Isn't it high time that we all broadened our horizons?
M. Mark Stolarik Slovak History and Culture University of Ottawa

Daniel Hobbins replies:
While the text of my article on Jean Gerson does not mention Jan Hus, the table that forms an appendix to the article (pp. 1336–37) includes Hus and many lesser-known contemporaries from Central and Eastern Europe. (One of my closest colleagues recently completed a dissertation on fourteenth-century Prague, and I am well aware of events there and of the scholarship surrounding Gerson, Hus, and the Council of Constance.) I welcome Stolarik's comparison of Hus to Gerson and generally encourage the application of this model of "public intellectual" to Gerson's contemporaries. I do not consider Gerson to be exclusive in this regard, but representative.
Daniel Hobbins Medieval Institute University of Notre Dame

ERRATUM

Harvard University Press is the publisher of Ira Berlin's Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, not Yale, as given in the February 2004 issue, p. 183.

LINKS

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