Gerson Judging Women of Spirit: From Female Mystics to Joan of Arc

Abstract

By reexamining the prevailing opinion that Gerson was hostile or skeptical toward female visionaries but made an unusual exception for Joan of Arc, I hope to challenge the legitimacy of this view and show in what ways it can be found wanting.¹ The extremely shaky foundations on which this two-part notion is based, which have gone largely unexamined by purveyors of the cliché, will be explored in what follows. It is principally the first part of the proposition that will be examined here. My pur-pose is to argue that the practice of discernment, in which Gerson was a renowned expert, and perhaps our own errors in interpreting the documents, not hatred either of women or of direct spiritual inspiration, are responsible for his alleged intolerance of the female visionary experience. Logically, scholars have deduced Gerson’s hostility to lay and feminine spiritual inspiration from his works on the discernment of spirits, since the very object of the process of discernment is to make pronouncements, either of fraudulence or genuine inspiration, in cases where direct experience of God is claimed. Thus my remarks address the four principal works on discernment by the chancellor: De distinctione verarum visionum a falsis (1401), Letter to Jean Morel or Judicium de vita sanctae Erminae (pre-1401?), De probatione spirituum (1415), and De examinatione doctrinarum (1423), although I will briefly comment on the plausibility of Gerson’s endorsement of Joan of Arc by reference to these tracts.