Abstract
This book has examined in detail how Gerson relied upon gendered rhetoric for the purpose of understanding, and also promoting, the authority of learned academic consensus, and failing that, the authority of the solitary contemplative theologian. I have argued that the particular gendered discourses, which Gerson employed in a given moment, were shaped as much by the demands and expectations of his audience as they were by his own professional goals. It is crucial that we remain aware of the fact that Gerson did not invent any of the gendered discourses or discernment methodologies that he employed, even those for which he is most famous. Rather, he creatively synthesized well-established misogynist and otherwise gendered discourses with the university’s belief that rational, expert, male consensus produced the most reliable truth claims. Even this innovative project of Gerson’s, however, drew upon well-established associations between the University of Paris and divine wisdom.
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Notes
For the argument that Gerson’s discernment treatises always produced a negative result as demonstrated by the execution of the visionary he supported, Joan of Arc, see Dyan Elliott, “Seeing Double: John Gerson, the Discernment of Spirits, and Joan of Arc,” American Historical Review, 107 (2002): 40, 43–54. For the argument that Joan’s execution was political and that those who executed her were also Gerson’s enemies,
see Daniel Hobbins, “Jean Gerson’s Authentic Tract on Joan of Arc: Super facto puellae et credulitate sibi praestanda (14 may 1429),” Mediaeval Studies, 67 (2005): 120.
Gregory IX, Parens scientiarum, in CUP I, no. 79: 137. For a detailed discussion of this bull in comparison with contemporary monastic ideals of comportment, see Ian Wei, “From Twelfth-Century Schools to Thirteenth-century Universities: The Disappearance of Biographical and Autobiographical Representation of Scholars, Speculum 86, (2011): 72.
For an excellent discussion of how theologians grappled with the tension between learned and revealed authority, see Ian Christopher Levy, Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority at the End of the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), esp. 1–53. For a concise discussion Augustine’s views on this subject,
see Margaret Miles, “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De trinitate and Confessions,” The Journal of Religion, 63, no. 2 (1983): 125–142. For the widespread, learned, and hierarchically sanctioned emergence of twelfth-century female visionary asceticism,
see Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. 49–84. For the Cistercian encouragement of laywomen’s visionary culture,
see Barbara Newman, “What Did it Mean to Say “I Saw”? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum, 80, no. 1 (2005): 25–26.
Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profi t Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978);
William Courtenay, “The Instructional Programme of the Mendicant Convents a Paris in the Early Fourteenth Century,” in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life: Essays in Honour of Gordon Leff, ed. Peter Biller and Barrie Dobson (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999), 77–92;
Tanya Stabler Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014);
and Nathalie Gorochov, Le Collège de Navarre: de sa foundation (1305) au début du IVe siècle (1418): histoire de l’institution, de sa vie intellectuelle et de son recrutement (Paris: H. Champion, 1997).
Tanya Stabler Miller, “What’s in a Name? Clerical Representations of Parisian Beguines (1200–1328), Journal of Medieval History, 33 (2007): 60–86.
Sara Poor, “Mechtild von Magdeburg, Gender, and the ‘Unlearned Tongue’,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31: 2 (2001),: 213–230.
F. Thomas Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006).
See Anne L. Clark, “Holy Woman or Unworthy Vessel? The Representations of Elisabeth of Schönau,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 35–51,
and John Wayland Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and their Male Collaborators. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
For the crucial role played by Gerson’s experiment with advising laywomen in his theological reform, see Chapter 2. For the popularity of his sermons, see Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 158.
André Vauchez, Sainthood in the later Middle Ages, trans. J. Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 85–123.
Howard Kaminsky, “The Politics of France’s Subtraction of Obedience from Pope Benedict XIII, 27 July, 1398,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 115, no. 5 (1971): 366–397; and Guenée, Between Church and State, 169–258.
Paris, BnF. ms. fr. 24841. For a discussion of this manuscript and the collection of Gerson’s works in the Abby of Saint Victor, see Danièle Calvot and Gilbert Ouy, L’oeuvre de Gerson à Saint-Victor de Paris: Catalogue des manuscrits (Paris: CNRS, 1990).
For a detailed discussion of other such figures that pulled together disparate identity characteristics with the effect of authenticating a new political or social reality, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003).
Ian Christopher Levy, “Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority among Three Late Medieval Masters,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61, no. 1 (2110): 40–68.
For the argument that Gerson’s approval of Joan reflected his French patriotism, see Jo Ann McNamara, “The Rhetoric of Orthodoxy,” in Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics, ed. Ulrike Wiethaus (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 26.
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McLoughlin, N. (2015). Conclusion. In: Jean Gerson and Gender. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488831_7
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