Authorship and Publicity Before Print

Recent years have seen a small explosion of books and articles on the fifteenth-century Parisian chancellor, Jean Gerson. Daniel Hobbins’ monograph is one of the best of them. Gerson was one of the most prolific and popular figures of his era, preaching to kings, commoners, and theologians; attempting to reform university life, clerical training, and papal government; and offering advice on hearing confessions, discerning true and false revelations, and understanding the deeper, mystical yearnings of the soul; the list goes on. Much of the recent work on Gerson has approached him through the lens of one of these discreet topics—Gerson the conciliarist, Gerson the preacher, etc. Hobbins’ new work stands out by successfully painting a full portrait of the chancellor as a public intellectual and self-conscious author, one who both reflected and shaped the major concerns of his day. The introduction and first two chapters offer a very helpful foray into the changing place of the book in late-medieval culture and the role of those books in Gerson’s theological world. In essence, a great increase in the availability of books and a simultaneous growth in literacy rates were creating a new audience of ‘textual consumers’. In response to this new reality, and under the influence of early French humanists at the College of Navarre, Gerson embraced the power of the written word and worked throughout his long career to use that power to influence a wide variety of constituencies. On the one hand, this meant the promotion of powerful (and orthodox) classics (such as Bonaventure’s The Journey of the Mind to God) as a curriculum of transformative reading for university students and others. On the other hand, this meant contemporary theologians (like Gerson) producing new, popular works that would address the pressing moral concerns of the day, a process that required careful application of the Christian theological tradition to the unique circumstances that arise in each and every new case. Such an attempt to use his theological expertise to address the complexities of real life (rather than just repeating abstract, general rules) was central to Gerson’s fame and earned him the title of Doctor Consolatorius. Overall, these opening chapters effectively counter any lingering notions that late-medieval theologians were all ivory-tower intellectuals counting the number of angels on the head of a pin. Chapter 3 continues the discussion of how Gerson understood his role as author by analysing the long, complex writings and poetry that he produced during his exile from Paris after the Council of Constance. While probably the least relevant chapter for the average medievalist, it does provide a helpful service to Gerson scholars, who have had a tendency to avoid the dense, unwieldy writings of his later years. Chapter 4 returns to the earlier topic of effective outreach to audiences beyond the university with a discussion of Gerson’s ideas about rhetoric and dialectic. In contrast to some traditional historiography that has followed sixteenth-century humanist diatribe in posing an absolute distinction between scholasticism and humanism, Gerson offers a more complex narrative of a man who tried to maintain the safe, careful, and precise language of traditional (thirteenth-century) theology, but balance it with an emphasis on the skills of rhetoric as a means to persuade the heart and the soul of listeners, not simply their intellects. Finally, Chapters 5–7 shift from Gerson’s self-perception to the material context in which Gerson is active—the shift from classroom-style writing (disputations and commentaries) to purely literary pieces, especially tracts, in the fourteenth-century university (Chapter 5); the complex process of composing, publishing, and revising texts in the half-century before the introduction of print (Chapter 6); and the distribution networks that enabled the international spread of Gerson’s texts, especially through Germany and the Low Countries (Chapter 7). These last three chapters are going to be especially useful for any medievalist, as they anchor the often abstract, theological writings of Gerson and others in the concrete, unique world of the later Middle Ages, distinct from both the older monastic and university cultures and the coming world of print which are much more familiar to most scholars. Indeed, Hobbins offers a wealth of concrete examples from both intellectual and material sources that truly make Gerson and his world come to life in a remarkable way. In particular, one cannot help but note the author’s impressive knowledge of Gerson’s manuscript tradition, and even more so his ability to transform such information into a narrative that was a pleasure to read. Overall, Hobbins’ text is a welcome addition to a variety of fields: the study of late-medieval writing and publishing, scholarship on the role of the theologian and the University of Paris in the larger culture, and, of course, the cottage industry of writings about the chancellor himself. It is highly recommended for academics and graduate students working in any of these areas.

Art · Art history · Fifteenth · Humanism · Literature · Mysticism · Political science · Portrait · Power (physics) · Protestantism · Publicity · Soul · Theology · Classics · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

• The Emergence of an Authorial Culture

  Open Access•Samu Niskanen•Meaning of Media•2021

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