Daniel Hobbins

The Schoolman as Public Intellectual: Jean Gerson and the Late Medieval Tract

The last thirty years have witnessed a transformation in late medieval historiography. The old master narrative of the Middle Ages, familiar through long retelling in textbooks, featured a renaissance of the twelfth century, soon extended to the thirteenth, followed by a period of crisis, stagnation, and decay.¹ Etienne Gilson gave the narrative its clearest expression for intellectual history in his History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (1955). Gilson saw the thirteenth century as the "golden age" of medieval thought, climaxing in Thomas Aquinas. The early fifteenth century, by contrast, was the "journey's end" of scholasticism, a period of "doctrinal confusion" whose "saddened and powerless witness" was the prolific chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson (1363–1429).²

This model is hardly dead, but it has now been so seriously undermined by scholarship of the last generation that it can no longer be assumed.³ Heiko Oberman led the assault by turning on its head Johan Huizinga's metaphor of an autumnal "waning," seeing in the late fifteenth-century theologian Gabriel Biel a "harvest" of medieval theology.⁴ In numerous books and articles, William Courtenay has redefined the field of late medieval intellectual history. Nearly every older study of the period labored under mistaken notions about nominalism as the poison in the intellectual waters of the later Middle Ages, eroding the foundations of late medieval literature, art, and spirituality. In an article that is still the best starting point for nominalism, Courtenay synthesized current research to discredit this model and to open the period to fresh approaches.⁵ Others, far too many to enumerate here, have recovered the period in other ways.⁶ Of these, we may mention the work of Bernard McGinn and now Niklaus Largier, who have seen in the fourteenth century a flowering of mystical theology, reaching full bloom in Meister Eckhart (d. 1328); and Zénon Kaluza and Paul Vignaux, who have offered an alternative to Gilson's dismissal of much late medieval philosophy.⁷ Yet the exact position of a schoolman such as Gerson in these studies remains ambiguous. Gerson is widely accepted as the most representative figure of the age, the leading voice at the most important center of theology in Europe, critical for understanding the period;⁸ and yet he remains marginalized as a philosophical or theological lightweight, even by some of the scholars I have just mentioned.⁹

There is a trap here if we focus exclusively on the history of ideas, in which Gerson will nearly always appear at best as a popularizer, at worst as a derivative and unoriginal theologian working in the twilight of a better age. I would like to reorient the discussion by turning the focus toward what may be called the "cultural positioning" of the late medieval schoolman, by which I mean his public status, his literary connection to a wider public, and hence his cultural relevance.

To begin, we may recall the place of the university in medieval society. From their earliest history, universities performed what we might call an internal and an external function. On the one hand were the internal school discussions and debates, involving the great efforts to harmonize Aristotle with revealed truth, the organization of legal and theological authorities into systematically arranged collections, and the commentaries on those collections or—in the case of medicine—on the standard collections of Greek medical texts that had reached the Latin West. On the other hand, the university always attracted most of its students because of its external function, supplying talented and literate individuals to society.¹⁰ The fourteenth century witnessed a shift in the balance between these two functions, reflected in the appearance of a new literary form that is the focus of this article.¹¹ While learned discussions of course continued, the greater perceived need was now the application of this learning to a larger world. Implied here was a certain assumption, clearly detectable in Gerson, a belief that the major works of thirteenth-century theology had achieved a kind of canonical status; and this assumption invited a turn outward toward application. This is the context for understanding the great explosion of university foundations—at least forty-six by one count—from 1350 to the end of the fifteenth century.¹² Above all else, these new universities met the growing demand of society for trained, literate professionals.

Gerson is crucial here because he illustrates this changing balance between the internal academic needs of the university and its external or "applied" function. His public status took various forms: chancellor, adviser to kings and princes, maker of popes, renowned international preacher, devotional writer, unquestionably the most recognizable intellectual figure of his age. Far from abandoning the "internal" task of writing, he mastered a new genre that facilitated the application of magisterial learning to topical concerns, religious, political, and social. The "tract" evolved out of the earlier school genres, but it did something they could never really do: it permitted an author to treat a current, popular topic in a form that could be easily distributed to a non-academic audience. Looking to his contemporaries, we see he exemplifies a much larger trend. Most schoolmen of this period had an enlarged public role, and the tract served many as the primary written vehicle in which they distributed and promulgated their opinions. The result was a publishing world far removed from the commentaries and classroom debates of the thirteenth century. The schoolman was now more than ever before a public figure.¹³

Hence my model: the fifteenth-century schoolman as "public intellectual."¹⁴ Conceiving medieval university figures as intellectuals is now a time-honored practice, going back to Jacques Le Goff's 1955 classic study.¹⁵ University-licensed theologians were in fact members of a guild—the original and enduring meaning of universitas—who through their training mastered a set of Latin texts comprising the sum of learning in the Christian West at this period. By the thirteenth century, the studium had acquired in some models a typological significance as one of the primary orders of society.¹⁶ Fully conscious of their special status, and despite the fact that their occupation was a historical novelty and furthermore was open to grave abuse, they articulated their roles in exalted terms as the arbiters of Christian doctrine and, at Paris, even as preservers of the kingdom.¹⁷

They were intellectuals, then, but especially after the outbreak of the Great Schism in 1378 their task acquired a new public dimension. This claim requires deft handling. Since Habermas, the term "public" has acquired a more focused usage through its application to the emergence in Europe of a "public sphere."¹⁸ The appearance of a large reading public, crystallizing in the salons, taverns, and coffeehouses of eighteenth-century Europe and capable of forming "public opinion" as a counterbalance to political authority, has no analog in the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, we certainly can speak of a large public for theologians such as Gerson, and of their desire to reach and inform this public.¹⁹ As a point of reference, we might compare what are commonly regarded as the most popular works of the Middle Ages. Dante's Commedia, one of the most popular works of the entire Middle Ages, survives in some six hundred to seven hundred manuscripts. Of the medieval works commonly read in undergraduate courses today, it had no rival in circulation. Boccaccio's Decameron survives in around a hundred manuscripts, Froissart's Chronicles in over a hundred, Piers Plowman in fifty-three. We have eighty manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, just sixteen of Troilus and Criseyde. Except for the Commedia, none of these works reached the circulation of Gerson's most popular works. His tract on nocturnal emissions survives in at least 160 manuscripts, his Opus tripartitum—a work of basic Christian instruction—in more than 200 (Latin and French versions) and was printed twenty-three times in five languages before 1500 (compared to four printings for The Canterbury Tales and one for Troilus). Longer works, too, such as Gerson's On the Spiritual Life of the Soul and the two treatises On Mystical Theology survive in close to one hundred manuscripts, ten others in more than fifty, and forty more in at least twenty.²⁰ Beyond the indisputable fact of Gerson's great popularity, the lesson here is that whenever we find a work circulating in dozens of manuscripts, we must also talk about some kind of a reading public.²¹

My argument concerning the increased public role of the medieval intellectual has two further components with respect to Gerson, to be developed below. First, we can trace in Gerson a shift in intended public, from an internal university audience to a much larger external audience. Second, Gerson did in fact have much success in reaching his public. Manuscripts tell only part of the story. Even with increased literacy and book production in the later Middle Ages, aided by the widespread introduction of paper into continental Europe after 1300 (which greatly reduced one important cost of bookmaking), this was still not a society in which most people could afford books.²² And Gerson knew this. The challenge for the historian is thus to find evidence of those mediating structures and institutions that Gerson employed to reach his audience.

The key to the entire argument rests on a more fundamental historical shift within the university itself. Changes within the school genres between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries had fundamentally altered the nature of scholarly discourse. I must now turn back to account for this shift. How is it that a schoolman such as Gerson could write over five hundred works, entirely ignoring traditional genres? What had become of them?

When we think of the writings of the schoolmen, we often think of the summa, which seems to go to the heart of the medieval intellectual world, above all the love of classification. The summa, though, like the treatise, was typically intended as an introduction for students and in any case was not very common.²³ To understand the literary realities of the thirteenth century, we must look elsewhere. Most thirteenth-century theologians published in very few genres, the most important of which were the quodlibet, the disputed question, and commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (a systematic arrangement and treatment of the "sentences" or opinions of mainly patristic authorities), the Bible, and the works of Aristotle (technically, a product of the arts faculty). To appreciate the structure of these written genres, we must always remember that each arose out of oral classroom experience. The commentary became the classic scholastic genre, but it took form quite literally from teaching a text and then reducing the oral commentary to writing. The quodlibet was public classroom debate at its finest, restricted to the most experienced, an academic free-for-all in which the master displayed his versatility by allowing questions on any topic his audience might choose. And the disputed question allowed the master to treat, in more thematic fashion, a problem that arose in the course of a class lecture on a text.²⁴

A strength of these genres was their flexibility. The Sentences commentary encouraged a bachelor of theology to survey the entire field while permitting philosophical speculation and even discussions of physical science.²⁵ Areas of practical life that traditionally had been overlooked or that had never been brought within the orbit of Christian teaching—warfare or economics, for instance—now found their place in scholarly discussions.²⁶ Perhaps more surprisingly, fourteenth-century Scriptural commentaries permitted theologians to pursue topics with little connection to the Bible passage.²⁷ The quodlibet, always popular for treating philosophical issues, was exploited to address more practical questions.²⁸ The so-called "second quodlibets" (I–VI) of Thomas Aquinas cover such areas as almsgiving, bigamy, crusades and indulgences, hell, and perjury, and were "known and quoted all over Europe from about 1300," finding their way into numerous pastoral manuals.²⁹

A bachelor or master of theology living in the year 1300 would have written most of his works in these genres. Then they began to fall out of favor. The Parisian statutes of 1366 and 1385 still made nice distinctions among the various forms of disputation in all the faculties. But by this point, the disputed question had become a teaching tool that held little interest for theologians.³⁰ The quodlibet fared no better. Important collections after 1320 are extremely rare, and the genre practically disappeared at Paris.³¹ A letter of John XXII on May 8, 1317, complains that masters have been squandering time on idle questions and subtleties, and that as a result the regular order of study has broken down. By 1385, the statutes have caught up to reality: anyone wanting to avoid the required quodlibetal dispute can preach a sermon instead.³²

The exact stages in this shift are difficult to discern, but this much seems clear: at some point, schoolmen began to use the question as a literary technique, unrelated to classroom setting; the resulting literary production looked increasingly like a tractatus.³³ Sometimes, these questions are actually designated as such in the manuscripts.³⁴ Across the fourteenth century, it becomes ever more difficult to say whether or not a classroom disputation lies behind a given text.³⁵ The quaestio, then, had evolved from an oral to a written form and by the fourteenth century began to appear as a learned, literary treatise. This, it seems, was a critical moment: the written form was severed from oral teaching.³⁶

Commentaries on Scripture and on the Sentences of Peter Lombard developed along similar lines.³⁷ While Courtenay has shown that Scriptural commentary survived through long periods of drought into the fifteenth century, as we shall see with Sentences commentaries these works were quite unlike the exegetical productions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.³⁸ The trend was now away from exegesis, toward a focusing of the discussion into individual questions that interested the author. Further, the major production of Scriptural commentaries, like that of Sentences commentaries, had by the early fifteenth century shifted to the younger Central European universities, Vienna in particular, as well as Prague and Cracow.³⁹ Gerson wrote no Scriptural commentaries at all.⁴⁰ The modern edition of his works includes lectures on the Gospel of Mark. In reality, these are carefully crafted literary productions that deploy the gospel text as a way to address an important topical subject—whether the Carthusians are justified in their refusal to eat meat, for example (citing Mark 1: 6, "[John] ate locusts and wild honey").⁴¹ Taken together, these "biblical lectures" cover barely a few verses from the first three chapters of Mark. The editor's attempt to credit him with a series of lectures covering all of these chapters over fourteen years (1401–1414) was motivated by a desire to fit his works into received categories of publication for theologians rather than by a strict examination of the evidence.⁴²

The pattern is much the same with the Sentences commentary, which by the late fourteenth century at Paris was greatly changed from the days of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.⁴³ Rather than bother to treat every question of the Sentences, theologians began to choose favorites, often the same from commentary to commentary, with the result that any notion of the commentary as an overview of theology was lost—a point that Gerson and others lamented.⁴⁴ By the second half of the fourteenth century, one question was often the focus of a long essay of ten to twelve folios. The label "Sentences commentary" is really no longer appropriate, and might better be replaced with something like "questions on the Sentences."⁴⁵ These questions could take the form of small treatises on given subjects, meant to stretch over several weeks of a class. Such was the case with Pierre Plaoust, who organized his lectures (1392–1393) under seven headings, with titles such as On the Enjoyment of God, On the Trinity, and On Predestination.⁴⁶ The chance survival of a student's notebook shows how a bachelor could lecture on subjects that interested him yet still fulfill the university requirement to treat all four books of the Sentences. At the end of each lecture, Plaoust simply took up the book of Lombard that he was supposed to be teaching and summarized its essential points as "conclusions," which thus stood in for the entire distinction.⁴⁷ On January 22, the student's alacrity in copying these down provoked the smiles of two masters—an incident I take to mean that they supposed he was being overzealous, since it was just as easy to consult the standard commentaries.⁴⁸ The notebook even provides dates that show how Plaoust managed to cover all of Lombard in a single year.⁴⁹ This was now what it meant to "read" the Sentences: choose interesting themes, never tarry long, and fulfill the obligation to survey all four books through token review sessions.⁵⁰ In some cases, theologians did not even go this far but simply cobbled together a commentary from the barely digested quotations of earlier authorities, or even read directly from other commentaries, as if loathe to waste energy on such a worn exercise.⁵¹ Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the late fourteenth century saw a decline in the publishing of Sentences commentaries at Paris.⁵²

There are already signs of a trend toward the commentary as an academic exercise, requiring little of what we might call original research (probably not unlike our modern lectures on "Western civilization"), as early as the 1350s at Paris, when bachelors were permitted to read the Sentences during summer vacation.⁵³ The circulated Sentences commentary in England, already out of fashion by the 1350s, virtually disappeared for the rest of the century.⁵⁴ The genre lasted longer at Paris, yet there, too, production steadily declined from 1360 to the end of the century, and, as in England, many of these commentaries survive in few manuscripts.⁵⁵ Gerson's modern editor credited him with a published Sentences commentary, but we have no evidence at all that Gerson ever prepared such a work for publication.⁵⁶ After 1400, the Sentences commentary seems to have survived only as a formality for most students, who (like Gerson) were merely fulfilling the requirements and did not even pretend to compose a commentary for circulation or to treat all of the Sentences.⁵⁷ By 1423 at the latest, instead of devoting a year solely to reading the Sentences, every bachelor of theology was combining the requirement with the second of the two required biblical lectures, which were themselves originally supposed to take two years (one year each for a book of the Old and New Testaments).⁵⁸ One Martin Berech efficiently managed to do all three—two biblical lectures and the Sentences—in a single year.⁵⁹

The Sentences commentary did remain available as a publishing vehicle.⁶⁰ But Pierre Plaoust's lectures, organized around favorite themes and taking the full plan of Lombard's Sentences largely for granted, is certainly a much better indication of what most bachelors of theology were doing.

The situation as I have outlined it stands thus: by the late fourteenth century, the earlier genres were often disappearing, or were at least far different from what they had been a century earlier, particularly at the English universities and at Paris. The interests of masters were changing as well. Just as the old days of the piece (pecia) system of copying—always concerned primarily with texts connected to classroom teaching—were forgotten after about 1350, so the attractive new topics for publication were not expositions of doctrine or commentaries but issues on the margins of the university's traditional domain.⁶¹

This is the context that may help us understand the rise of what I have called the tract, as the most important genre to appear in this later period. We may define it as a treatment of a single moral case with some connection to the world outside the university in a form brief enough to be easily distributed.⁶² Though never explicitly recognized as such, this genre was in fact an important component in the production of almost every major fifteenth-century theologian. Just as the commentary served the needs of an earlier generation, so the tract became the way to respond to new cases that arose across a wide spectrum of issues. The Table offers a sampling of common topics, clearly identifiable by title, addressed by theologians and by canon lawyers in tracts or treatises between roughly 1350 and 1475.⁶³ I have included canon lawyers to show that these discussions went beyond a single faculty. Whatever the degree or faculty status of these authors, they addressed these common problems from their roles as teacher, adviser, or lawyer. Like the change in genre, this, too, was a marked change from the thirteenth century. The emergence of this broader public space was fundamental in defining the late medieval intellectual world.

All the explosive issues of the day—the Hussite and Wycliffite heresies, contract law and usury, simony, superstition and magic—these and many others were now being treated primarily in tracts. The tract possessed clear advantages. Earlier genres, especially commentaries, tended to imprison the topic of discussion within a predetermined structure and had thus always been severely limited in their ability to reach non-university audiences.⁶⁴ Thirteenth-century scholastic works were indeed never translated into French in the Middle Ages; surely, their authors never supposed that they would be.⁶⁵ The tract was closer to the disputed question but was even more accessible and likely to be read outside the schools. One key reason for this, it seems, and one of its greatest advantages over earlier genres, was that the tract advertised its topic in the title. Here was a reader-friendly genre defined by its subject matter. Finally, the fact that the genre had no necessary connection to teaching meant that schoolmen could use the tract as a kind of "rapid-response" opinion piece, not unlike our editorial. It could be produced "on the fly" (in transcursu), then quickly copied and circulated.⁶⁶ A startling example is Gerson's tract on Joan of Arc, written on May 14, 1429, just six days after her great victory at Orléans, barely enough time for the news to reach him at Lyons. Long desiring the recovery of France, no doubt Gerson had considered Joan's claim for some time, and her astonishing victory provided him with an opportunity to distribute his opinion.⁶⁷

Besides the wide range of issues covered in tracts, the Table illustrates Gerson's complete adoption of the form. More than anyone else, Gerson established this genre as the basic publishing vehicle for theologians. Of course, he did not invent the form. Rather, he took a preexisting genre, streamlined it, and published in it so often and so successfully (judging by manuscript distribution) that it soon became a kind of default genre for many theologians, some clearly by direct imitation. It is no exaggeration to say that Gerson put his stamp of ownership on it in a way that has never been fully appreciated. In fact, the Table cannot do justice to how completely he appropriated the form. Training of children, scribal work, the Roman de la Rose, assassination—he addressed these and numerous other subjects in tracts, all-told producing a mountain of literature that still has not been completely sorted out and analyzed. It is the principal reason why historians have been unable to reckon fully with him, this endless stream of tracts on disconnected topics. He used the form to pronounce on all the important issues of the day and to link his name inseparably to the great controversies of the age. If any previous university theologian had such wide interests, none had tried so consciously to reach an extra-university audience, none had employed the tract, sometimes in the vernacular, to address these issues, and none had been so successful.

Historically, then, the tract effectively symbolizes the nature of theology in this age, the evolution away from system-building at a time when scholarly reputations were no longer founded on large commentaries. It simply served the needs of late medieval theologians better than the commentary. The historical implications go further. At some level, this shift away from earlier forms also implied changing attitudes toward the past. Some, like Gerson, seem to have sensed that the production of large commentaries and summas was no longer necessary. Gerson, when he was not citing his own works, recommended a fairly consistent canon of thirteenth-century texts and authors, figured as "the great luminaries of the world."⁶⁸ The appearance of the tract thus coincided with a reorientation toward the past whereby the thirteenth century first rose to prominence as the great age of classification.⁶⁹ Gerson himself sensed that he was living at some distance in time from the thirteenth-century masters, who—he expressly states—wrote differently, proceeding by questions and arguments, producing works remarkable for their organization. In practice, the earlier Sentences commentaries and summas were now being assumed, some few of them serving as "classics." The task at hand was to apply magisterial learning to the real world, sometimes to completely new occasions; to meet "new diseases" with "new cures," as Gerson's brother Jean the Celestine put it in a forceful defense of Gerson's "new writings."⁷⁰

Thus far, I have argued that the tract was the central and even the defining genre in the works of fifteenth-century schoolmen, and that this was a fundamental change from the earlier period. Foundational genres such as the commentary and the disputed question, while still present, were now largely serving different purposes. I must now meet with a possible objection: that what I have called the "tract" was no different from earlier school treatises. In fact, earlier university masters did occasionally write systematic expositions of doctrine focused on a single subject, often labeled tractatus as well. For convenience's sake, I will call these "systematic treatises." The systematic treatise was an overview of a single subject, like a summa in that it was designed for beginners as an introduction to a discipline—a kind of expository manual such as Thomas Aquinas's On Being and Essence, probably the first work that Aquinas wrote.⁷¹ Such a work was nearly incomprehensible outside a university. By contrast, the tract was a further step in the development of the independent question (the question format is often retained), now at last free from its immediate classroom origins and functioning as an independent form. The key distinction here is that the tract addressed or at least drew from a specific case, while the systematic treatise provided an impersonal overview of a subject. In theory, we can imagine these categories in direct opposition. In practice, the tract often took on features of the systematic treatise. Gerson wrote his tract on contracts in response to a case submitted to him by the prior and abbey of the Carthusian mother house. In the first section, he listed twenty general "considerations"; in the second, he dealt with the case.⁷² So, too, in an effort to produce a systematic treatise, an author might take a specific case and strip it as best he could of details.⁷³

We could wish that schoolmen and scribes would have found another term for my genre of "tract." Many did just that without reaching a consensus. By far the most common designation is tractatus, often tractatulus, emphasizing brevity, but there were a host of others.⁷⁴ Often, the same text receives different designations in different manuscripts. Sometimes, these works have no technical designation at all, as in works "On Simony" (De simonia), "Against the Jews" (Contra Judaeos), "In Support of Clerical Celibacy" (Pro coelibatu ecclesiasticorum), and "On the Mission of the Maiden" (that is, Joan of Arc, Super facto puellae). The great variety of terminology suggests an implicit awareness that there was no recognized formal category for these works.

To illustrate the structure of a tract, we turn back again to Gerson's treatment of Joan of Arc, On the Mission of the Maiden and the Trust That Should Be Placed in Her.⁷⁵ Structurally, it bears signs of hasty composition.⁷⁶ While its organization sometimes echoes formal school models, Gerson clearly does not feel hemmed in. He begins with three assumptions, adds three further "conditions," then relaxes into a much more discursive style before presenting his conclusion, that it is legitimate to support the maiden, whom Gerson never mentions by name. He then elaborates further in support of his conclusion, attacking those who speak slightingly of Joan, and adducing further circumstances and biblical examples in her favor. The tract continues in this fashion over four edited pages. Never once does Gerson resort to that hallmark of the scholastic method, the presentation of arguments for and against (pro et contra). Manuscripts of the work show that he did here what he did elsewhere. He completed the tract and then, intent on molding public opinion, added a short section in defense of Joan's male clothing. It is the first defense of Joan on this issue.⁷⁷

Stepping back to take a broader view, we can see a parallel development in the faculties of law and medicine, where the period after 1350 witnessed the spectacular growth of perhaps the most characteristic genre of the age: the consilium, essentially a lawyer's advisory brief on a specific case, or a physician's report that prescribed treatment "for an individual patient on a specific occasion."⁷⁸ In all instances, the consilium addressed a specific case rather than providing a systematic discussion of an abstract or theoretical topic.⁷⁹ Nearly every major late medieval jurist and medical master published in this form.⁸⁰ To reach a larger audience, lawyers and medical masters could turn to the tract or treatise. Specific events sometimes encouraged this development. Just as the beginning of the Great Schism in 1378 accelerated the trend toward shorter, self-contained treatments among theologians, so the Black Death in the second half of the fourteenth century led to the publication of numerous plague tracts that often ignored the classic authorities and "launched straight into practical advice and procedures."⁸¹ Samuel Cohn has estimated that as many as one thousand of these tracts circulated in Europe between 1348 and 1500.⁸² The trend in theology thus appears as part of a general move across the disciplines toward shorter genres that applied the learning of the schools to specific circumstances. The picture we should imagine of the late medieval university is of a dynamic institution whose faculties were increasingly addressing real-world cases, legal, medical, and moral.

A final caution here. Of course, I am not implying that earlier schoolmen never applied theology to the outside world. Not just thirteenth-century schoolmen but twelfth-century masters such as Peter the Chanter and his circle did so. John Baldwin has shown that, unlike their predecessors, the members of this scholarly community showed "intense interest in practical questions," and "not only formulated ethical theorems but attempted to apply them to the infinite variety of human behavior."⁸³ But the question for us is audience, and the genres that Peter employed—Scriptural commentaries, summas, and a long book on ethics—indicate once again the kind of public he was addressing.⁸⁴ Studies such as those of Jürgen Miethke have shown that thirteenth and early fourteenth-century schoolmen were involved in debates on papal power.⁸⁵ Here, though, we are still in the ecclesiastical world, involved in an internal conversation between churchmen and theologians. However broad the scope of twelfth and thirteenth-century learned writings, the fact remains that these were written for a scholarly audience and could only reach non-university audiences through intermediaries. Even when Peter Olivi (d. 1298) wrote Latin treatises intended for communities of Beguines, he apparently expected others to translate them into the vernacular—and they did.⁸⁶ The quodlibet is rightly celebrated for its ability to treat practical topics, but it could never reach a non-university audience as directly as the tract could. Beyond the university, this and the other school genres were only accessible through intermediaries.

We can now return to the problem we began with: Gerson is everywhere recognized as important. Why? In an age when the commentary seemed downright backward-looking, he represents the coming of a new type, made possible by the shift to the tract: the theologian as controversialist, concerned with issues of public morality, always ready to give his opinion on current popular topics, and eager to reach a large audience. Named university chancellor in 1395, he was the public face of the University of Paris. But he was more. Comparing him to our contemporary public experts, we may think of him as a medieval public intellectual, the licensed expert in moral theology—a field that covered a range of human activity many times broader than the expertise of any modern authority. As chancellor, he held the office necessary to command a large audience, a kind of "bully pulpit" giving him permanent visibility. It gave him the vision to step outside his own faculty and to see developments in others.⁸⁷ Court preacher by twenty-five, friend of the nobility, probably the single most important churchman at the Council of Constance, politically identifiable as a Valois supporter against the Anglo-Burgundians and hence in exile from Burgundian-controlled Paris for the last fifteen years of his life, forever moving in exalted circles—Gerson was all this, while still close to "the people," criticizing the political leadership for oppressing them through heavy taxation, ever conscious of the honest poverty from which his parents had raised him up.⁸⁸ He was also fortunate in having personal secretaries as well as an admiring younger brother, Jean the Celestine, who became the key figure after Gerson himself in establishing and promoting his reputation and in ensuring the widespread circulation of his works.⁸⁹

I have called Gerson a medieval "public intellectual." Who, then, was his public? Whereas today's public intellectual can address a literate public directly through a variety of media, to reach his audience Gerson preached and wrote in Latin and in French. He addressed his works to parish priests, monks and nuns, hermits and popular preachers, and the increasingly literate laity; and to the powerful, to bishops, popes, nobles, and the royal family.⁹⁰ What further sets him apart from his predecessors, he appealed to these audiences not through intermediaries but quite directly. To reach the nonliterate, he preached in parish churches and attempted to shape their world through their social and spiritual advisers and superiors.⁹¹ Just as striking is Gerson's self-consciousness of something new happening here, his belief that theologians and other church leaders had thus far either ignored the "simple people" or addressed them "badly" (male), without taking care that the message be properly understood. Here as so often, his model was the faculty of medicine. So he tells Pierre d'Ailly in 1400 that, just as the faculty of medicine circulated a tract (tractatulus) during the plague, so the faculty of theology should now publish "some tract [tractatulus] on the principal points of our religion."⁹² His most spectacular success in this regard, judging by distribution (200 manuscripts, as we saw), was his Opus tripartitum, a work that Gerson wrote separately both in French and in Latin and that he hoped would ensure universal literacy in the basics of the Christian faith.⁹³ In a dedicatory letter addressed to "Christendom," Gerson urges that the work be posted in "common places," churches, schools, hospitals, and "places of religion."⁹⁴ As elsewhere, Gerson was desperately attempting to reach his audience, in this case an audience the schoolmen had thus far almost entirely ignored.⁹⁵

Gerson was hardly the first to produce tracts of this kind. John Wyclif (d. 1384) in particular initiated something of a pamphlet war toward the end of his career, and soon after 1378 numerous writers wrote about the Schism in short tracts, poems, and longer treatises.⁹⁶ But Gerson's proximate models were more likely two Parisian theologians, Henry of Langenstein and Pierre d'Ailly. Gerson knew the writings of both well, particularly those of his "distinguished teacher," Pierre d'Ailly (the phrase is Gerson's, used repeatedly). His references to their works suggest that he imagined them all participating in a similar project with respect to the publication of these shorter works.⁹⁷ Yet differences remain. Langenstein still seems to be writing within a university context. Subdivided into parts and chapters, his treatises are evidently intended as systematic guides. His popular treatise on contracts was so large (two sections of fifty and thirty-eight chapters) that pieces of it circulated as separate works.⁹⁸ On the other hand, Langenstein, too, was sometimes trying to reach non-academic audiences: his treatise on the discretion of spirits seems to have been addressed to monks.⁹⁹

With D'Ailly, we find more similarity to Gerson. Like Langenstein, his works on a single subject tend to be longer and more subdivided than the great majority of Gerson's tracts. Yet the number of topics common to both is telling: sometimes they are treating the very same case. In fact, the exact relationship has yet to be completely worked out, but recent studies suggest that it would be a mistake to assume that Gerson simply imitated his master in the production of these shorter works. D'Ailly was only thirteen years older than Gerson, and the influence worked in both directions, perhaps even more from Gerson to D'Ailly.¹⁰⁰ Even toward the end of his life, D'Ailly copied large portions of two Gerson works for his own On Ecclesiastical Power (a borrowing that has been completely overlooked),¹⁰¹ and he always remained far behind Gerson—though eager to catch up—in his mastery of certain elements identified with humanism, including his Latin style and knowledge of the classics.¹⁰²

Langenstein, D'Ailly, and others such as Wyclif used the tract, but Gerson made it his primary method of publication, mastering its potential for wide circulation and breathing into it his own distinctive style, above all shortening it and eliminating its bulkiness. As few others, he recognized the great advantage for the reading public of a short work defined by its subject matter in the very title, organized under a few convenient points. "I am passing by the proofs," he says in the tract against the Hussites, a perfect motto for his approach.¹⁰³ Organizationally, he abandoned the standard rubrics, articles and chapter and book divisions, preferring "considerations," which he saw as ideal organizational devices, easily remembered and clear in meaning.¹⁰⁴ Gerson used the term consideratio much as we use it. "Considerations" were simply ideas that occurred to him on a subject. They appear constantly, in tracts, sermons, and letters. In Gerson's mind, the device freed him from the duress of dialectical reasoning and allowed him to write in a more leisured and meditative fashion. Rhetorically, it permitted a more fluid text. Abandoning chapters and articles, he retained some basic textual organization—enough that Erasmus (who otherwise approved of Gerson, alone among schoolmen) criticized him for excessive subdivision.¹⁰⁵

It all depends on the point of reference. In his own day, Gerson was a pioneer in his departure from scholastic style. The question of Gerson's "humanism" is relevant here because there is very suggestive evidence that Gerson shared with contemporary humanists a common stylistic ideal: clarity (claritas), in opposition to "obscurity."¹⁰⁶ He remarks in Against the Curiosity of Students (1402), addressing students:

To despise clear and solid doctrines because they seem insignificant, and to explore those that are more esoteric [obscuriores], is a sign of curiosity and original sin, and contrary to penitence and simple belief. In all doctrine, there is no greater virtue than clarity, nor is there any clearer proof of a superior and brilliant mind than clarity of words and writings ... For every use of language is lovelier and worthier of praise even as it is clearer—unless by chance all taste and correctness have been cast aside, and then it is despised, it lacks energy, and is forgotten.¹⁰⁷

The opposition between "clear" and "obscure," which might at first seem vague or traditional, is instead a striking restatement of the language of contemporary debates over style. Petrarch himself, whom Gerson had read and imitated in several works, favored obscurity at one point, particularly in allegory, but moved toward clarity over the course of his life.¹⁰⁸ At Avignon, contemporary French humanists debated the relative merits of an "obscure" and of a "clear" style, sometimes in language remarkably similar to Gerson's in this passage.¹⁰⁹ The opposition between the stilus rhetoricus and the stilus obscurus in Italian letter writing is older still, stretching back to at least the thirteenth century.¹¹⁰ By no means empty verbiage, these terms were fundamental to how writers defined themselves in this culture. Gerson took these terms and applied them in new ways, to the writing style of contemporary theologians as he saw it, as well as to their approach to theology.

Whatever this move beyond the schools involved for others, for Gerson it meant rethinking the role of theologians outside the classroom, consciously modifying his approach for nonspecialists. There are few more revealing passages in all of Gerson than toward the close of On the Two Kinds of Logic, where he warns that the tendency of modern theologians to ignore differences in audience, and to indulge in logical, metaphysical, and even mathematical terminology in the presence of others such as the law faculties, has given them a reputation as "sophists," "windbags" (verbosi), and even phantastici, or "imaginative fools."¹¹¹ This was what had to be avoided at all costs. We can even sense here a concern over public image and the fear of mockery, the reputation of the theologian outside his own faculty. Not the least of Gerson's fears was that, emerging from the schools, theologians would begin speaking and no one would understand them.

From Gerson's intended public and the literary devices used to reach them, let us now return to the question of Gerson's actual audience. This is an enormous topic that can only be sketched in broadest outline here, but it is worth attempting both because of its historical importance and because Gerson scholars have so far almost completely avoided the issue. We know more about Gerson's French-reading audience than about his Latin-reading public. Geneviève Hasenohr has used contemporary references to manuscript owners in wills and lists, as well as indications of ownership in the manuscripts themselves, to draw a picture of the French-reading public of Gerson's day.¹¹² What we can safely say is that already, by the end of his life, certain of Gerson's French works were achieving the status of devotional classics, joining a very select and much older group of texts. Copies of his works, bound sometimes in expensive illuminated manuscripts, sometimes in much humbler paper manuscripts, found their way into ducal and other lay libraries. We know, for instance, that six copies of Gerson's famous Passion sermon of 1403 (Ad Deum vadit) belonged to ecclesiastical owners, while eleven belonged to lay owners. These lay owners spanned a wide social range: the dukes of Burgundy and Bourbon and the queen of France, lower-ranking nobles and courtiers, a medical master, and two widows, including Jeanne de Velle, a middle-class widow from Tournai who died in 1434.¹¹³ This general pattern of distribution also holds for Gerson's other popular French works.¹¹⁴

We saw earlier that Gerson's Latin works enjoyed wide circulation. But who read them? One can speak in general terms of his audience here as "clerks," allowing the English word to perform a double task. They were clerics (clerici) in a strict legal sense, receiving the tonsure and the protection of the church, but they were just as much learned clerks or "bookmen," individuals with some book learning who performed a wide variety of tasks as advisers, lawyers, teachers, chaplains, tutors, and so on.¹¹⁵ Absent general studies, we will look at the early reception of one work as a suggestive example. For this, we return to Gerson's tract on Joan of Arc.¹¹⁶ Completed at Lyons on May 14, 1429, within mere weeks the tract had reached Rome, where the Dominican Jean Dupuy copied the work into his continuation of a universal history. The speed with which it circulated is important evidence; Gerson consciously distributed the work immediately upon its completion. Here as elsewhere, it is entirely appropriate to speak of Gerson as "publishing" his works.¹¹⁷ As early as the fall of that year, the work appears again in pro-English territory at Paris, where it came to the attention of a canon lawyer who attacked it. The work appears yet a third time this same year among supporters of Joan at Bruges. On November 20, the Venetian merchant Pancrazio Giustiniani sent the work from Bruges to his father in Venice, encouraging him to show it to the doge and others who might like to see it. Besides an illustration of how quickly and widely tracts could sometimes circulate, there is a larger lesson here about how readers responded to texts in different ways. Jean Dupuy found the text useful to buttress his claim that Joan of Arc was divinely inspired. The anonymous lawyer may well have thought that Joan was deluded, but this was hardly an academic dispute; he also sensed the political stakes and saw the need to challenge Gerson's opinion publicly. Pancrazio Giustiniani used the work to inform his father and political authorities in Venice not about Joan—the tract almost certainly would have told them little they did not already know—but about "learned public opinion" concerning Joan, her support by Europe's most important intellectual.

Gerson's own writings provide further clues as to how he circulated his works through intermediaries. On several occasions, he sent letters to Charles "the dauphin" recommending lists of reading and a general plan of instruction.¹¹⁸ In 1424, he sent various French works to Charles VII through his physician and tutor, Jean Cadart. Well aware of the unlikelihood of the king at twenty-one actually reading the works, he suggested to Cadart that either he or the king's confessor might explain the works aloud to the king.¹¹⁹ We considered earlier Gerson's seemingly desperate attempt to reach a lay audience with his Opus tripartitum, by suggesting that the work be posted in public. Through a surprising reference in a rare incunabulum published at Bruges, we know that the bishop of Thèrouanne did in fact post the work "in two large tables" in the choir of his cathedral sometime before his death in 1414, that the tables were still there when the volume was printed at Bruges between 1470 and 1480, and that therefore the public attending the cathedral found themselves confronted by the work for at least half a century.¹²⁰

In his efforts to propagate his works, Gerson of course benefited from his privileged status as chancellor and from personal secretaries who effectively edited his works and ensured their spread, but he also did everything he could to ensure that his works would endure and remain accessible.¹²¹ This task involved sending his works to correspondents who asked for them or directing them to places where they could be found,¹²² drawing up lists of his works and constantly referring to them in the course of his writings,¹²³ publishing individual works in collections,¹²⁴ and, less than a year before his death, depositing his complete works with the Celestines of Avignon with instructions that they be kept locked in a specially designated cabinet, yet be available for copying.¹²⁵ Gerson relied heavily on the Carthusians and the Celestines, not just to preserve his works but to make them available for others; he also counted on those to whom he sent works to distribute them. Like many others, he seized upon the great gathering of intellectuals from all over Europe at the Council of Constance to correct earlier works for distribution and to publish many new ones, some of which he publicly pronounced to give them wider circulation.¹²⁶ The Councils of Constance and Basel became clearinghouses for texts of all kinds, old and new, and Gerson benefited as much as anyone. The full story of Gerson's success as a publicist has yet to be told, and we must be careful not to overstate what was possible in the fifteenth century. The greatest gains in literacy were still to come. Printing made possible the multiplication of works beyond anything scribal culture could muster. But the problem thus far has been that this success has been ignored rather than overstated. The public for intellectuals was growing; it was a public that in turn advised, preached, wrote, and informed the rest of society. And, more effectively than any previous schoolman, Gerson reached this public.

Besides the wide circulation of Gerson's writings, a constant backdrop to this study has been their vast scope and variety. The challenge now is to give some sense of the logic behind the literary corpus of Gerson. How did theologians imagine their task in this new, "post-commentary" world? Stated in the broadest terms, the issue here is the problem of literary creativity in a culture that prized not originality but adherence to accepted authorities and timeless wisdom. It was a commonplace of learned discussions that "everything necessary has already been written." Yet even while repeating this wisdom almost as a reflex, Gerson carefully carved out space for new writings. He is witness to a tension between the desire to be seen as repeating old authors while at the same time producing something new. If it is true that "cultural belatedness is never acceptable to a major writer," then a clearer case of what has been called the "anxiety of influence" would be hard to imagine.¹²⁷ Here as elsewhere, Gerson positioned himself in opposition to canon lawyers. The basic vice of those debating in the public forum, he writes in his tract against the Hussites, is the stale repetition of old authors, a procedure he associated especially with the canonists and their tyrannical citations. Heedless of living authorities, they exalt dead commentators to the skies:

And so those who consider matters with care marvel exceedingly when they see that the minute some doctor has produced a single lecture, composition, or gloss upon the Decretals or the Decretum,¹²⁸ and has put it in writing, the gloss or lecture is so revered that it is cited in due form in the schools and in the courts. And if that doctor were living, he would not compare to many thousands now alive. And even if an entire university, for example, which has doctors of the highest skill in every faculty, were to pronounce or make a determination upon one exposition of a single passage of Holy Scripture, the Decretum, or the Decretals, a proof of this kind would scarcely be credited or received—as if a dead writing has more authority than living words. And if anyone objects that the judgment of the living is compromised because of the corruption of the will, then why can't we likewise assume that the dead were subject to passions that clouded their judgment when they were alive?¹²⁹

Gerson used similar language in his tract On Contracts, a topic that, like simony, brought theologians and canon lawyers into direct conflict. The living, licensed theologian, he says there, has even more right to be heard in the public forum than the dead because he can attend to the circumstances of each case.¹³⁰ Historically, these passages communicate well his frustration: whenever he confronted a jurist, he found himself under assault with citations to the commentaries on canon law.

On issue after issue, Gerson found himself challenged by canon lawyers.¹³¹ As we saw with his tract on Joan of Arc, over half the surviving manuscripts add the rebuttal of the anonymous canon lawyer.¹³²On Contracts bears even more traces of confrontation. After composing the work, Gerson discovered a diatribe against usurers written by a canonist in Catalonia (whose identity remains uncertain). So he added a section attacking this work. In 1429, this exchange came to the attention of the well-known canonist Johannes of Imola at the University of Bologna. After examining the matter pro et contra, he agreed with the Catalonian master, while acknowledging the justice of Gerson's position: these contracts were illicit but not usurious.¹³³ Such debates illustrate the world theologians were entering. They were now competing with canon lawyers on common ground, writing works on exactly the same topics, and struggling to control the terms of debate.¹³⁴

In Gerson's view, the canonists were taking principles from legal commentaries and elevating them to general rules. To his thinking, this procedure was doomed because circumstances change over time. Reality cannot be subdivided as though it is a summa, nor rationalized into legal codes. This thinking in terms of circumstances and specific cases had its roots in the older literature for confessors, but Gerson applied the idea in a new way to the task of the professional theologian.¹³⁵ On issue after issue—confession, revelations, simony, and many others—Gerson rejected the possibility of laying down general rules and insisted on the licensed theologian evaluating each new case based on his own experience.¹³⁶ In his crucial work on intention, On Guiding the Heart (1417), he explains that neither the Fathers nor the "more recent" schoolmen handed down a solution to moral or intellectual issues. While the latter have made progress on certain intellectual problems, they have failed to move people in the affections. Many theologians these days, he continues, consider moral or practical theology as beneath their dignity, "yet no branch of knowledge is more difficult because of the infinite variety of circumstances."¹³⁷ The theologian must accommodate inevitable changes in spiritual appetites, revolutions of tastes, personal differences, and shifting circumstances.¹³⁸ As we have different faces, so we have different souls. What makes some sick makes others healthy.¹³⁹ In short, the moral theologian will never run out of material. New cases arise each day that old authors never imagined, and these must be evaluated "as the wise man will judge." Here, Gerson took over a metaphor traditionally applied to confessors—the physician—and applied it to university theologians. The theologian's model should be the medical master, who at some point must set aside his books and trust his own judgment.¹⁴⁰ This, the central platform of his case for new writings, does much to explain the bewildering variety and complexity of his literary production, and his opposition to the canonists. In this sense, one might think of him in opposition to Thomas Aquinas, the great organizer. Gerson looked out at the world and saw himself surrounded by irreducible complexity and variety. The circle of human action as he imagined it was composed of an infinite number of individual cases, each sui generis. The canonists, he believed, too often attempted to force this complexity beneath rubrics of laws and decrees, the authors of which could not have imagined the present world. They, not the theologians (he might have said), were enslaved to their system, refusing to account for change.

An aspiring theologian at Paris around the year 1250 would have known that, to make a name for himself, he would need to publish commentaries or perhaps quodlibets. By 1400, the published quodlibet had vanished with little trace, and becoming famous by writing commentaries would have been as easy as achieving fame today by publishing poetry: not impossible, but highly unlikely. The oral exposition of basic texts continued, but on a fairly low level; it could no longer make a scholar's reputation, nor could it be used to reach a larger public. It bears repeating that Gerson did not publish a single commentary—by any meaningful definition of that term—and yet made a name as the greatest schoolman of his age. He did so by entering the public arena as no university master before him, and attempting to control the terms of debate. I have not said that he was always successful in his interventions, or that he was always liked or listened to. He was often resented. But this is the whole point: unlike Thomas Aquinas, he had a public presence outside the university to be resented, and rather than lament the "vulgarization" of scholastic theology, we should recognize the historical shift that was occurring here.

The idea of a public intellectual embraces the new cultural reality of the late medieval schoolman, particularly as applied to Gerson: his mastery of a set of important texts, his stature in the world beyond the university, his wide and varying interests, his many strategies for reaching a wide public and his apparent success in doing so, and his strong political identification with France. Gerson is not alone in these wider interests, but more than others he capitalized on preexisting conditions and set the pattern for others to follow.

The public intellectual participated in debates outside his discipline. This notion of a common public arena, it seems to me, provides a key for understanding the broad trends of the late medieval university, especially the participation of various faculties in a common debate and the increasing application of magisterial learning to real-world cases. As important as the distinction between nominalism and realism is for the history of ideas, or the "pre-history" of the doctrine of justification for Reformation scholars, what concerned a much greater number of schoolmen, theologians and lawyers alike, were topics with broader and more practical application. For a deeper understanding of the cultural positioning of the schoolman, historians must reckon with this public arena. I have focused primarily on Gerson's debates with canon lawyers. He also sparred with medical masters, particularly over astrology.¹⁴¹ We have also seen that he borrowed techniques from the faculty of medicine. His favorite metaphor for theologians is the physician, who heals the endlessly varying diseases of the body as the theologian heals those of the limitless soul. Public intellectuals such as Gerson debated in public, but they also saw and learned, and modified their approach accordingly.

Appendix: Common Topics in Late Medieval Tracts and Treatises by Theologians and Canon Lawyers
part 1

Appendix: Common Topics in Late Medieval Tracts and Treatises by Theologians and Canon Lawyers
part 2

Note: plain text = theologian, italics = canon lawyer
Sources for Table : Abbreviations next to the date of death refer to the sources used in each case: Compendium auctorum Latinorum Medii Aevi (CALMA) (Bottai, 2000– ); Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon (VL) (Berlin, 1977– ); Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen Age (DLF) (Paris, 1994); Dictionnaire de spiritualité (DS) (Paris, 1932–95); Dictionnaire de droit canonique (DDC) (Paris, 1935–65); Richard Sharpe, A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540 (HLW) (Turnhout, 2001); Thomas Kaeppeli, Scriptores ordinis praedicatorum medii aevi (SOP) (Rome, 1970–93); and Johann Friedrich Schulte, Die Geschichte der Quellen und Literatur des canonischen Rechts von Gratian bis auf die Gegenwart (GQL) (Stuttgart, 1875–80), vol. 2. In many cases, it was necessary to consult other sources cited in the reference works, and I have not listed these here. Sources for other writers are as follows: for John of Lignano, E. Giannazza and G. D'Ilario, Vita opere di Giovanni da Legnano (Legnano, 1983); for Henry Totting of Oyta, Albert Lang, Heinrich Totting von Oyta (Münster, 1937), 99–113; for Pierre d'Ailly, L. Salembier, Petrus de Alliaco (Lille, 1886), xiii–xix (supplemented by Aldo Pasquero, "L'Inedito 'Tractatus supra Boetium' di Pierre d'Ailly: Edizione critica" [dissertation, Universita di Torino, 1982], 1–132); for Gerson, Oeuvres complètes, P. Glorieux, ed., vols. 2–10; for Henry of Gorkum, A. G. Weiler, Heinrich von Gorkum (Einsiedeln, 1962), 93–101; for Narcissus Herz, manuscripts of his treatise on contracts include Vienna, Schottenkloster, Hs. 290 (286), fols. 37r–40r (where it appears as a response to Gerson's treatise on contracts); Vienna, österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Hs. 4576, fols. 132v–134v; and (with a different incipit: the only complete copy?) Utrecht, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Hs. 10 B 1, fols. 28r–44v; for Bernardino of Siena, Giovanni Giacinto Sbaraglia, Supplementum et castigatio ad scriptores trium ordinum S. Francisci ... (Sala Bolognese, 1978); for Guillaume Saignet, Nicole Grévy-Pons, Célibat et nature, une controverse médiévale (Paris, 1975), 84, and Gerson, Oeuvres complètes, 9: 476; for Juan of Segovia, Repertorio de historia de las ciencias eclesiáasticas en España, vol. 6 (Salamanca, 1977), 271–347; for Robert Ciboule, André Combes, "Un témoin du socratisme chrétien au XV^e siècle: Robert Ciboule (1403–1458)," Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 8 (1933): 107–22; for Denys the Carthusian, Kent Emery, Jr., Dionysii Cartusiensis Opera selecta (Turnhout, 1991), 1: 218–57; and for Gilles Charlier, P. V. Doucet, "Magister Aegidius Carlerii ...," Antonianum 5 (1930): 412–22.

I wish to thank the many friends and colleagues who read this article and offered valuable suggestions: Lezlie Knox, Deborah McGrady, James Mixson, Maureen Boulton, Thomas Noble, Kent Emery, Jr., James Forse, Gilbert Ouy, and especially David Mengel and Rachel Koopmans. The article also benefited greatly from the comments of the anonymous reviewers and the editorial staff of the AHR. The broad conceptual argument owes most to John Van Engen, who read numerous versions, fully engaged the work, and offered crucial guidance and insight from beginning to end.

Daniel Hobbins completed his PhD (2002) at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame, where he currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship. His research interests focus on the cultural role of universities, schoolmen, and humanists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Hobbins's current projects include a book on Gerson that explores changing notions of authorship and strategies of publicity before printing, a new edition of Gerson's tract on Joan of Arc, and a new translation of the trial of Joan of Arc.

Notes

^1.� A good recent overview with criticism of the crisis model is Howard Kaminsky, "From Lateness to Waning to Crisis: The Burden of the Later Middle Ages," Journal of Early Modern History 4 (2000): 85–125.

^2.� Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York, 1955), 528.

^3.� In his last word on the subject, Sir Richard Southern saw the later period as literally a "period of disintegration" and a "state of decline" when "the scholastic method of discovering truth by patient analysis and compilation" gave way to "different methods of investigation." Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, Vol. 1: Foundations (Oxford, 1995), 12–13.

^4.� Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism, 3d edn. (Durham, N.C., 1983); Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch, trans. (Chicago, 1996).

^5.� William Courtenay, "Nominalism and Late Medieval Religion," in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, eds. (Leiden, 1974), 26–59; also see his "Late Medieval Nominalism Revisited: 1972–1982," Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 159–64. Other important studies include his Adam Wodeham: An Introduction to His Life and Writings (Leiden, 1978); and Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J., 1987).

^6.� For an overview of recent trends, see Marcia L. Colish, Remapping Scholasticism (Toronto, 2000).

^7.� Among the many studies of Bernard McGinn, see the latest volume in his ongoing history of Western Christian mysticism, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism—1200–1350 (New York, 1998). Niklaus Largier, Zeit, Zeitlichkeit, Ewigkeit: Ein Aufriss des Zeitproblems bei Dietrich von Freiberg und Meister Eckhart, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1993); Paul Vignaux, Philosophie au Moyen Age (Albeuve, Switzerland, 1987), see 267–76 for a bibliography of Vignaux's scholarship. Zénon Kaluza has produced numerous studies of forgotten individual schoolmen; for a synthesis, see "Bulletin d'histoire des doctrines médiévales: Les XIV^e et XV^e siècles," Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 79 (1995): 113–59.

^8.� Compare the comments of William J. Courtenay, "Spirituality and Late Scholasticism," in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, Jill Raitt, Bernard McGinn, and John Meyendorff, eds. (London, 1987), 117–18. Etienne Delaruelle, E.-R. Labande, and Paul Ourliac treated the fifteenth century as "le siècle de Gerson": L'Eglise au temps du Grand Schisme et de la crise conciliaire (Paris, 1962–64), 2: 837–69.

^9.� Compare Bernard McGinn, preface to Brian Patrick McGuire, Jean Gerson: Early Works (New York, 1998), xiii; Z. Kaluza, Les querelles doctrinales à Paris: Nominalistes et réalistes aux confins du XIV^e et du XV^e siècles (Bergamo, 1988), 60–61, 124.

^10.� Alan B. Cobban, "Reflections on the Role of the Medieval Universities in Contemporary Society," in Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson, Lesley Smith and Benedicta Ward, eds. (London, 1992), 227–41; Jacques Verger, "Le rôle des universités françaises du Moyen Age et de l'Ancien Régime: Utilité sociale et formation professionelle," in Enseignement et recherches en gestion: Evolution et perspectives (Quatrièmes rencontres, 24 et 25 novembre 1995) (Toulouse, 1996), 47–56.

^11.� On the growing claims of universities to intervene in external affairs, see R. N. Swanson, Universities, Academics, and the Great Schism (Cambridge, 1979), 13–19.

^12.� Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden, eds., 3 vols. (Oxford, 1936), 2: v–ix. This does not include the many college foundations at Oxford and Cambridge. See further Swanson, Universities, Academics, and the Great Schism, 11–13.

^13.� Recent studies touching on the theme of the growing public presence of late medieval schoolmen include Michael H. Shank, "Unless You Believe, You Shall Not Understand": Logic, University, and Society in Late Medieval Vienna (Princeton, N.J., 1988); Maarten Hoenen, "Academics and Intellectual Life in the Low Countries: The University Career of Heymeric de Campo (†1460)," Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 61 (1994): 173–209; Hoenen, "Denys the Carthusian and Heymeric de Campo on the Pilgrimages of Children to Mont-Saint-Michel (1458)," Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 61 (1994): 387–418; and Serge Lusignan, "Intellectuels et vie politique en France à la fin du Moyen Age," in Les philosophies morales et politiques au Moyen Age (Actes du IX^e Congrès international de Philosophie Médiévale: Ottawa, du 17 au 22 août 1992), C. Bazáan, E. Andáujar, and L. G. Sbrocchi, eds. (New York, 1995), 267–81. More generally, see Jacques Verger, "Les professeurs des universités françaises à la fin du Moyen Age," in Les universités françaises au moyen âge (Leiden, 1995), 174–98.

^14.� For modern context of discussions about the public intellectual, see the introduction by Helen Small in The Public Intellectual, Small, ed. (Oxford, 2002), 1–18.

^15.� The most recent edition in English translation is Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, Teresa Lavender Fagan, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). For further orientation, see Rita Copeland, "Pre-Modern Intellectual Biography," in Small, Public Intellectual, 40–61.

^16.� Herbert Grundmann, "Sacerdotium—Regnum—Studium: Zur Wertung der Wissenschaft im 13. Jahrhundert," Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 34 (1952): 5–21.

^17.� Serge Lusignan, "Vérité garde le Roy": La construction d'une identité universitaire en France (XIII^e–XV^e siècle) (Paris, 1999); Ian P. Wei, "The Self-Image of the Masters of Theology at the University of Paris in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995): 398–431.

^18.� Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001), 3–15, is extremely helpful for orientation.

^19.� On the notion of public opinion (öffentliche Meinung) with reference to the late medieval councils, see Jürgen Miethke, "Die Konzilien als Forum der öffentliche Meinung," Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 37 (1981): 736–73. On the idea of a "public" (Öffentlichkeit) in the later Middle Ages, with direct reference to Habermas, see J. Helmrath, "Kommunikation auf den spätmittelalterlichen Konzilien," in Die Bedeutung der Kommunikation für Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Hans Pohl, ed. (Stuttgart, 1989), 158–59.

^20.� These manuscript figures include partial copies. Gerson manuscripts include those listed in the modern edition (P. Glorieux, ed., Oeuvres complètes, 10 vols. [Paris, 1960–73]), supplemented by many more that I have identified. For the other authors mentioned, see their modern editions. On the early editions, see Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (Stuttgart and New York, 1968– ), 9: 515–26, 6: 437–42.

^21.� On judging "success" based on circulation, see Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l'Occident médiéval (Paris, 1980), 248–99; Helmrath, "Kommunikation auf den spätmittelalterlichen Konzilien," 160–66.

^22.� Paper mills spread from Spain and Italy in the thirteenth century, and were operating in northern France by the mid-fourteenth century. In northern France, paper was four to eight times cheaper than parchment in the fourteenth century, thirteen to twenty-eight times cheaper in the fifteenth century. Carla Bozzolo and Ezio Ornato, Pour une histoire du livre manuscrit au Moyen Age (Paris, 1983), 31–37. On the introduction of paper, see Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, David Gerard, trans. (London, 1976), 17–18, 29–44; R. I. Burns, "Paper Comes to the West, 800–1400," in Europäische Technik im Mittelalter 800 bis 1200: Tradition und Innovation, Uta Lindgren, ed. (Berlin, 1996), 413–22; and R. L. Hills, "Early Italian Papermaking, A Crucial Technical Revolution," in Produzione e commercio della carta e del libro, secc. XIII–XVIII (Florence, 1992), 73–97 (95–96 on the spread of paper mills).

^23.� Compare M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas (New York, 1964), 298: "The Disputed Questions were the book suited to masters, the Summa is the book of the pupil."

^24.� This evolution from the spoken to the written word is best described by Jürgen Miethke, "Die mittelalterlichen Universitäten und das gesprochene Wort," Historische Zeitschrift 251 (1990): 1–44 (here, 13–32). General surveys of these forms include Olga Weijers, Le maniement du savoir: Pratiques intellectuelles à l'époque des premières universités (XIII^e–XIV^e siècles) (Turnhout, 1996); William J. Courtenay, "Programs of Study and Genres of Scholastic Theological Production in the Fourteenth Century," in Manuels, programmes de cours et techniques d'enseignement dans les universités médiévales: Actes du Colloque international de Louvain-la-Neuve (9–11 septembre 1993), Jacqueline Hamesse, ed. (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1994), 325–50; Monika Asztalos, "The Faculty of Theology," in A History of the University in Europe, Vol. 1: Universities in the Middle Ages, Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ed. (Cambridge, 1992), 409–41; J. I. Catto, "Theology and Theologians 1220–1320," in The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. 1: The Early Oxford Schools (Oxford, 1984), 471–517; Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg, "Medieval Philosophical Literature," in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg, eds. (Cambridge, 1982), 11–34; and P. Glorieux, "L'enseignement au Moyen Age: Techniques et méthodes en usage à la Faculté de théologie de Paris au XIII^e siècle," Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 35 (1968): 65–186. Also see Rolf Schönberger, Was ist Scholastik? (Hildesheim, 1991), 52–102.

^25.� John Emery Murdoch, "From Social into Intellectual Factors: An Aspect of the Unitary Character of Late Medieval Learning," in The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, Murdoch and Edith Dudley Sylla, eds. (Dordrecht, 1975), 275–78; Bert Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature (Toronto, 1985), 109–13; Konstanty Michalski, "Les sources du criticisme et du scepticisme dans la philosophie du XIV^e siècle," in La philosophie au XIV^e siècle: Six études (Frankfurt, 1969), 37. The new starting point for the Sentences commentary is G. R. Evans, ed., Mediaeval Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Vol. 1: Current Research (Leiden, 2002).

^26.� Southern, Foundations, 45–51. Peter Biller has recently treated scholastic teaching on "avoidance of offspring" and abortion: The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought (New York, 2000), esp. 57–59 and 166–77 on Sentences commentaries, where the subject is treated at book 4, distinction 31. In the same vein is Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools (Leiden, 1992).

^27.� W. J. Courtenay, "The Bible in the Fourteenth Century: Some Observations," Church History 54 (1985): 181–82, 187.

^28.� J. F. Wippel, "Quodlibetal Questions, Chiefly in Theology Faculties," in Les questions disputées et les questions quodlibétiques dans les facultés de théologie, de droit et de médecine (Turnhout, 1985), 158 and n. 3, also 221–22. On Henry of Ghent's and Godfrey of Fontaines' quodlibets dealing with economic questions, see Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge, 1998), 101–15.

^29.� Leonard E. Boyle, "The Quodlibets of St. Thomas and Pastoral Care," The Thomist 38 (1974): 249, 252. On the quodlibet in general, the basic studies are Palémon Glorieux, La littérature quodlibétique de 1260 à 1320, 2 vols. (Le Saulchoir, Kain, Belgium, 1925–35), to be supplemented by Amédée Teetaert, "La littérature quodlibétique," Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 14 (1937): 75–105; Wippel, "Quodlibetal Questions," 153–222, with a valuable annotated bibliography (153–56); and J. F. Wippel, "The Quodlibetal Question as a Distinctive Literary Genre," in Les genres littéraires dans les sources théologiques et philosophiques médiévales (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1982), 67–87.

^30.� B. C. Bazáan, "Les questions disputées," in Les questions disputées et les questions quodlibétiques, 43, 46–48, 146–47. Compare J. I. Catto, "Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford 1356–1430," in The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. 2: Late Medieval Oxford (Oxford, 1992), 178–80; and William J. Courtenay, "Parisian Theology, 1362–1377," in Philosophie und Theologie des Ausgehenden Mittelalters: Marsilius von Inghen und das Denken seiner Zeit, Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen and Paul J. J. M. Bakker, eds. (Leiden, 2000), 5–7.

^31.� Glorieux, La littérature quodlibétique, 1: 57; also Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 251–52.

^32.� Bazáan, "Les questions disputées," 48 n. 74.

^33.� See here Miethke, "Die mittelalterlichen Universitäten und das gesprochene Wort," 1–44, esp. 30–36.

^34.� O. Weijers, La disputatio à la faculté des Arts de Paris (1200–1350 environ): Esquisse d'une typologie (Turnhout, 1995), 31–32.

^35.� For an example of this problem and its significance, see the controversy surrounding the dating of Nicole Oresme's Quodlibeta. Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature, 7, 35–40, 43–44, and 46–48, esp. 46 and n. 32. The same problem arises in dating certain of Gerson's "question" treatises. Glorieux dated many of these to his university career, presumably because of their "academic character" (Glorieux often failed to justify the dates he assigned), even though Gerson wrote works in the style after he had left the university. Scholastic genres and scholastic style were entirely "portable," or capable of being used outside the university.

^36.� Weijers, Le maniement du savoir, 66. Compare Courtenay, "Programs of Study," 338.

^37.� For what follows on Scriptural commentaries, I have relied on Courtenay, "Bible in the Fourteenth Century," 176–87. Courtenay's is the only study on the subject since Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale (Paris, 1959–64). Beryl Smalley intended to write but never completed a volume on late medieval Scriptural commentaries (Courtenay, 176).

^38.� So Pierre d'Ailly produced exercises on the Psalms and the Song of Songs in the 1370s, but Glorieux notes that the Expositio super Cantica Canticorum "n'est point un commentaire, mais simplement une présentation, un résumé du texte." P. Glorieux, "L'oeuvre littéraire de Pierre d'Ailly: Remarques et précisions," Mélanges de science religieuse 22 (1965): 67–68; Courtenay, "Bible in the Fourteenth Century," 183.

^39.� Courtenay, "Bible in the Fourteenth Century," 187; Berndt Hamm, Frömmigkeitstheologie am Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1982), 179; see also 135 n. 21.

^40.� Gerson's Collectorium super Magnificat, sometimes called a commentary, is instead a collection of twelve lengthy treatises on a mere ten verses of Scripture, written mostly in dialogue, discussing topics with the slightest possible connection to the literal meaning of the passage. Likewise, scholars have sometimes treated his Monotessaron as a commentary, when it is instead a harmony of the Gospels, intended as a kind of handbook for theologians. Thomas More could actually write his Treatise upon the Passion in the form of a commentary on the Monotessaron. Thomas More, A Treatise upon the Passion, Garry E. Haupt, ed., in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, 15 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1963– ), 13: 50. Another commentary on the Monotessaron with numerous illuminations exists in two manuscripts. See Albert Derolez, "L'editio Mercatelliana du Monotessaron de Gerson," in Hommages à André Boutemy, Guy Cambier, ed. (Brussels, 1976), 42–54.

^41.� See the important discussion in C. Burger, Aedificatio, Fructus, Utilitas: Johannes Gerson als Professor der Theologie und Kanzler der Universität Paris (Tübingen, 1986), 35–40, here 35.

^42.� "Les 'Lectiones duae super Marcum' de Gerson," Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 27 (1960): 347. See also P. Glorieux, "L'enseignement universitaire de Gerson," Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 23 (1956): 88–113. Compare Burger, Aedificatio, Fructus, Utilitas, 36, and 40, also citing Combes.

^43.� For what follows, see P. Glorieux, "Sentences," Dictionnaire de théologie catholique 14 (1941): 1871–77, esp. 1874–76. Also see Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 252–55, 327–74; "Programs of Study," 332–33, 340–42; John Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction (London, 1987), 31–33; and Catto, "Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford," 178–80, 255–56.

^44.� See, for example, in the letter to Pierre d'Ailly, Dum mentis aciem, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 27–28.

^45.� The suggestion of Katherine Tachau, cited in Courtenay, "Programs of Study," 340–42.

^46.� P. Glorieux, "L'année universitaire 1392–1393 à la Sorbonne à travers les notes d'un étudiant," Revue des sciences religieuses 19 (1939): 461–62.

^47.� Glorieux, "L'année universitaire 1392–1393," 463–64.

^48.� Glorieux, "L'année universitaire 1392–1393," 443.

^49.� He began book 1 on October 11, book 2 on December 30, book 3 on March 27, and book 4 on May 20 (P. Glorieux, "L'année universitaire 1392–1393," 465–66).

^50.� Questions and commentaries appear nearly indistinguishable by 1400, a point made by Catto, "Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford," 178. The same development can be detected in the arts faculty with commentaries on Aristotle, which evolved from comments on the literal text to more amplified quaestiones and conclusiones to independent treatises (in the faculty of arts at Oxford) that blended natural philosophy, logic, and mathematics. Miethke, "Die mittelalterlichen Universitäten und das gesprochene Wort," 35 and n. 74; Charles H. Lohr, "Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries," Traditio 23 (1967): 313; and on the Oxford independent treatises, J. M. M. H. Thijssen, "Late-Medieval Natural Philosophy: Some Recent Trends in Scholarship," Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 67 (2000): 175.