A Conversation Between Daniel Hobbins and David Cressy

The History department hosted a round table conversation with Dr. David Cressy interviewing Dr. Daniel Hobbins about his new book, Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning. I have yet to read the book, Dr. Hobbins, though, was on my committee and I have taken several classes with him so Gerson and late medieval culture became part of my schooling. During the course of the event, other people also got the chance to put forth questions. This is my summary of the event based on my notes. As always, any mistakes made are mine.

Cressy: Authorship and Publicity Before Print is a book about conversations. There are four conversations in the book. The nature of this period, which you do not view as an extension of the Middle Ages, publication before print, the career of Jean Gerson and, finally, this a book about media and communication.

Hobbins: This project began with Gerson. I did not want this book, though, to be about just Gerson. This book changed from the original dissertation and I expanded it. Anyone who wants to use the term late for a period is heading toward trouble. Traditionally the late Middle Ages has been viewed as a time of trouble. I am responding to Johan Huizinga’s Autumn of the Middle Ages. Huizinga saw a decline from the twelfth century. He made heavy use of Gerson. In the words of one scholar: The last contribution of the Middle Ages was spoken before 1378 (Start of the Great Schism). One can also view this period as a harvest of medieval thought or as a precursor to humanism. There is a need to move outside of this box and see the late Middle as a period in its own right.

Cressy: Gerson seems to be everywhere in the book and he was a very important person in his own time, though his work did not manage to cross the channel or the Alps. Why is he outside of our narrative?

Hobbins: Gerson does not fit into the narrative. I would have a difficult time if I wanted to put him into a textbook. He is not the High Middle Ages and he is not the Renaissance. The Western Civilization textbook is not designed to teach that civilization does not develop linearly.

Geoffrey Parker: What role does the Schism play in the distribution of Gerson manuscripts? Why does Gerson not make it into England and Italy?

Hobbins: By the Council of Constance, there is this panic over Wycliffism. So you can see how easily texts can spread during this period. That being said, in this period, books are not distributing fluidly. For example, Thomas a Kempis was a bestseller but did not make it into Spain.

Barbara Hanawalt: What about Gerson’s dabbling in popular politics such as in the case of Joan of Arc?

Hobbins: Gerson preached at court so he was part of a political network. There is a move away from mendicants to having the secular clergy occupy these positions. His big cause early in his career was the assassination of the Duke of Orleans in 1407. This leads to his work on tyrannicide. This work is quoted by James I in the seventeenth century. Gerson ended his life in exile after Paris ended up as part of the Anglo-Burgundian regime in 1418. His work on Joan of Arc was used at her retrial in the 1450s.

Cressy: What did it mean to be a public intellectual in the fifteenth century?

Hobbins: There is not the coffee house public of the eighteenth century but there is a public discourse. You have theologians reaching a wide public. How does this fit into a narrative of decline? That being said this could not have been more than ten percent of the public. This is still, though, far more than the audience reached by medieval scholastics such as Aquinas.

Gregory Pellam: Gerson was responding to Petrarch. Was this a key feature in the development of a French nationalism that the French are always correct?

Hobbins: In the fourteenth century English theologians are being condemned by the papacy for mixing logic and theology. Gerson is part of this anti-English tradition. Nationalism is a very controversial issue. Is Joan of Arc an example of nationalism? She was hearing voices telling her to go support the king of France against the English so God, in her view, supports France as opposed to the English.

Cressy: We have a public that is being fed news. It would seem that this is a public sphere.

Hobbins: Jurgen Habermas, when dealing with the Middle Ages, talks about nightly courtly publicity. He simply co-opted the traditional image of the Middle Ages, without dealing with the wider culture.

(The political philosopher, Jurgen Habermas is the author of the controversial thesis that the eighteenth century saw the birth of the "public sphere." Medievalists have been quite keen on showing that there was a public sphere during the Middle Ages. The question becomes what counts as a public sphere. It is clear that there existed a more of a public than Habermas thought. Habermas was writing during the 1960s at a time when medieval studies was still a study of church and aristocracy. Since then scholarship has "discovered" the common man and have made him a historical force to be reckoned with. There is a similar debate with nationalism. Nationalism is usually associated with the nineteenth century. Did it exist during the Middle Ages? Depends on how you define nationalism.)

To what extent was Gerson concerned about his work getting outside of his control?

Hobbins: Scribes mangling texts was a common concern going back to antiquity. Gerson, though, writes in praise of scribes. He recognized the important role that scribes play in putting forth his ideas. He lived to see his work being distributed. He gathered material that he wrote to be distributed. Imitation of Christ is often wrongly attributed to Gerson. Why did Gerson not write it? He never took the time to write a masterpiece.

Cressy: Gerson’s brother served as a sort of manager. He helped distribute his work.

Hobbins: We would still have Gerson without his brother. A Dominican like Aquinas would have had a stationer copying his work and passing them along. Gerson also had a privileged circle of copyists.

Cressy: Any comparison to modern times? Modern issues seem to play a large role in your book.
Hobbins: We are in a transitional time. Printed texts are imitations of manuscripts that is the only way they could have caught on. Gerson is almost begging for a printing press. He had his work put on tables so people in mass could read them.

Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part V)

Voaden, Rosalynn. God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries.

Rosalynn Voaden sees prophecy as representing one of the very few areas in which women could be empowered even within a patriarchal system such as the Church. This empowerment depended on having access to the discourses found in the formal Church structure. Educated women could form useful alliances with members of the Church hierarchy and could translate their experiences in ways that men would understand. In the texts that Voaden deals with, she finds evidence that these female visionaries “co-operated with the prevailing ideology in general, and with certain representatives thereof, in the persons of spiritual directors and scribes, in particular, thus participating in their own empowerment.”[1]

The focus of Voaden’s work is on the concept of discretio spirituum. This was a methodology developed by clerics in the later Middle Ages to differentiate between people acting under the influence of the Holy Spirit and those acting under the influence of the devil. There were seven signs. One, that the person led a virtuous life under the guidance of a proper spiritual director. Two, the vision should inspire the soul with an overwhelming love for God and reverence for the Church. Three, that the visionary should feel a deep inward understanding of the truth. Four, that that only true things are revealed to the visionary. Five, that the vision bore good fruits. Six, that the visionary should be able to predict the hour of their death. Seven, that posthumous miracles be performed. According to Voaden:

… the doctrine was, in effect, a discourse, developed and elaborated by ecclesiastical authorities, a discourse which provided both a vocabulary to articulate visionary experience and a set of criteria to evaluate the vision and the visionary. In addition, discretio spirituum supplied a pattern for self-fashioning which extended to behavior, demeanor and modes of expression. Familiarity with, and skill in, the discourse was a vital factor in the textual – and physical – survival of the visionary. Facility with discretio spirituum empowered medieval women visionaries and enabled them to fulfil[l] their divine mandate to communicate revelation.[2]

The majority of the book is devoted to a case study of two female visionaries, Bridget of Sweden and Margery Kempe and how they were received by the Church; Bridget of Sweden was successful at navigating the discourse of discretio spirituum, while Margery Kempe failed at it. Margery comes across, in her writing, as a very forceful and independent personality while Bridget of Sweden comes across as a blank cipher. As historians, we might find Margery Kempe’s work to be far more interesting and worthy of preservation than Bridget of Sweden’s work for precisely the same reasons why the Church did not approve of her and approved of Bridget of Sweden. Margery Kempe took a strongly independent role for herself; even though she attempted to gain the approval of the Church, she failed to hold on to a spiritual director. While she gained the respect of many ecclesiastical authorities, she constantly quarreled with her spiritual directors and hence could not hold on to one. Bridget of Sweden succeeded in maintaining the aid of Alfonso of Jaen, who went on to advocate for her canonization. Margery Kempe seems to have been fairly unlearned, particularly in matters related to discretio spirituum, while Bridget of Sweden was relatively well educated and, in particular, understood discretio spirituum. Margery Kempe’s visions tended to be more corporeal, while Bridget of Sweden’s visions were of an intellectual nature. Margery Kempe was a married woman, who had abandoned her husband for life as a wondering pilgrim. Furthermore she engaged in activities that seemed to veer rather closely to preaching. Bridget of Sweden, though she was originally married, became a nun after the death of her husband.

Despite the fact that Bridget of Sweden was portrayed by Alfonso of Jaen as a meek passive servant of the Church, her status as a visionary made a major power. Kings and popes alike heeded her advice. She involved herself in the Hundred Years Wars, supporting the English. She played a crucial role in bringing the papacy back to Rome from Avignon. She did live as a cloistered nun, but traveled about, working to create her own order of nuns, the Bridgettines.

Voaden offers a fascinating analysis of the specific cases of Margery Kempe and Bridget of Sweden. My problem with this work, though, is that Voaden does not offer a broader context for the material she deals with. This work does not discuss the situation of men; how did the Church apply discretio spirituum to men? This is crucial because if the Church handled men in the same manner then discretio spirituum ceases to be a women’s issue. At the end of the day I am not convinced that discretio spirituum was a coherent ideology that was ever put into practice by the Church. It is too vague. The two male theologians that Voaden deals with, Alfonso Jaen and Jean Gerson, are perfect examples of this. Alfonso Jaen wrote on discretio spirituum to promote the veneration of Bridget of Sweden. Jean Gerson wrote to argue against her canonization. Did their respective decisions have anything to do with Bridget’s success at handling the discourse of discretio spirituum? In the case of Jean Gerson it is clear that he opposed her in large part because she supported the English in the Hundred Years War.[3] In the end discretio spirituum would seem to have simply been a discourse to be used to justify whatever one was inclined to believe from the beginning. The most a female visionary could hope to do in order to navigate the discourse of discretio spirituum was to tie herself to the right clergymen and hope that he would come through for her.

[1] Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices pg. 3.
[2] Ibid pg. 4.
[3] Jean Gerson would later go on to write a book defending Joan of Arc. This would suggest he was less motivated by misogyny or the technicalities of discretio spirituum than by politics. See Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman pg. 264-96.