Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (review)

Impressive in its scope and eloquence, Daniel Hobbins's study of Jean Gerson and his place in the world of late medieval learning can be situated within a broader current of scholarship that is reexamining the intellectual culture and achievements of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Even within this trend, however, Hobbins's study will stand out for its original interpretation of Gerson's career and the unassuming skill with which it links that career to broader developments in late medieval Europe. Gerson's complex life and large body of writings have often challenged, even baffled, scholars. As a result he remains little known and poorly understood outside the circle of specialists devoted to him, although this situation is being rectified. This state of affairs may stem from the fact that Gerson's multifaceted career resists synthesis, particularly within the frameworks often applied to late medieval learning. Hobbins's book identifies a common thread winding through Gerson's career, namely, the production and use of writing. Hobbins constructs the main argument of his book from this thread, which (as stated with admirable clarity on the first page of the book) is that studying Gerson's belief in the need for good writing and appropriate interactions with it provides the best foundation both for understanding the trajectory of his career and for situating him within late medieval culture.

To this remarkably precise argument, Hobbins adds a wider secondary claim: that Gerson was indeed broadly representative of late medieval culture. This contention proves vital to Hobbins's larger goals. One of the reasons that Gerson has previously resisted synthesis is that he seems to fit uneasily in the categories normally employed to understand the intellectual culture of his era. The most obvious of these are "scholastic" and "humanistic." When the former is applied to the fifteenth century, it usually connotes a period of decline in learning caused by scholars' exaggeration of the worst excesses of scholasticism. Conversely, the latter interprets the fifteenth century as a foreshadowing of later humanistic achievements. Both frameworks characterize Gerson's age as a transitional period, a valley between two mountains (to borrow Hobbins's own imagery). In proposing Gerson, who fits neither category comfortably, as representative of the period, Hobbins seeks to rehabilitate the fifteenth century from a shadowy liminality and establish it as a vital period of learning that can be defined on its own terms.

These goals are laid out in the introduction, which also provides a sketch of Gerson's career and a survey of important changes in written culture during the late Middle Ages, particularly the expansion of the reading public and the boom in written production. These observations, along with a brief discursus on the insufficiency of the scholastic/humanist dichotomy as a model for understanding Gerson, provide the infrastructure for the seven chapters that follow. The first chapter discusses Gerson as a "bookman," detailing how he interacted with books and how he envisioned others interacting with them. Central to Gerson's approach to reading was a real excitement over increasing access to texts coupled with an anxiety over the security of theology in a world characterized by such prolific writing. His response to this anxiety was to propose a canonical set of authoritative books that should be approached as complete texts, rather than through excerpts or compilations. Likewise, Gerson advocated the creation a single, secure theological vocabulary that would restrain heresy and constrain curiosity.

The next two chapters turn to Gerson's ideas about authorship. Chapter 2 focuses on how Gerson, having established a canon of books that provided all necessary theological language and truth, justified the authorship of new works. Proposing a subtle new connection between theology and authorship, Hobbins demonstrates that Gerson found in moral theology a field where the authorship of new books was not only permissible but imperative. For Gerson, moral theology was based not...