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Chapter 5 The Schoolman as Public Intellectual Implications of the Late Medieval Tract A few weeks before Gerson began to pour out his soul to the College of Navarre, he wrote a letter to his master, Pierre d’Ailly (1 April 1400). Still recovering from sickness, he spoke of all that was wrong with the theology students of his day. At the letter’s close, he appended a list of remedies. One demands our particular attention. Gerson observed that in the past ‘‘the faculty of medicine composed a tract [tractatulus] to instruct people in the time of certain pestilences.’’ The faculty of theology , he thought, could use the same strategy to give instruction on the principal points of the Christian faith—especially the Ten Commandments —‘‘to the simple people,’’ whom the learned rarely address, if ever. Or when they do try to reach them, they do it badly.1 Gerson must have had in mind the Compendium of the Paris medical faculty. First published in October 1348 out of a concern for the public welfare (utilitas publica), it famously concluded that a triple conjunction of planets in Aquarius had caused the plague by corrupting the air; in a much longer section, it then offered remedies under the headings of prevention and medicine.2 The work had enormous impact. French translations appeared almost immediately, and an entire generation of plague tracts borrowed liberally from it. There is evidence to show that the faculty continued to publish it long after 1348; a copy in the British Library says that it was sent from Paris to Milan in 1373 during an outbreak of plague.3 So the 1348 Compendium provided later theologians with a model for how to distribute information. What appealed to Gerson about the plague tract was not its simple language but its portability that allowed for easy distribution. He calls it a tractatulus rather than tractatus, so emphasizing its brevity. No doubt he was also thinking of expense. He spoke elsewhere of tracts that could be cheaply distributed .4 I suppose that Gerson would have pounced on the printing press for its capacity to distribute information in a cheap format. To my knowledge , no other contemporary so clearly articulated a desire for something like the printed pamphlet. The Schoolman as Public Intellectual 129 Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is Gerson’s awareness of a shift in approach from earlier days. Something has changed: the university master now has a nonacademic public, not merely in preaching but also in writing; he has a responsibility to reach them and must adapt his message to them. Earlier schoolmen, he felt, had missed the chance to deepen the roots of the Christian faith. In his awareness of a need for greater outreach to the laity, Gerson reflects a widespread and growing concern in this period, especially in the sphere of religious belief and devotion.5 In this chapter, we come to terms with this momentous shift by tracing the evolution of academic genres that led to the development of the late medieval tract. In Chapter 2, we saw that Gerson relied heavily on the tract as a feature of his argument for new writings and hence his justification for authorship. The argument here is different : that the genre itself testifies to the public nature of theology in this period, to the broadening of audiences, and to a shift in focus from the interpretation of books to the investigation of moral, social, and spiritual concerns.6 The tract evolved out of earlier school genres, but it did something that they could never really do: it permitted an author to treat a current, popular topic in a form easily distributed to a nonacademic audience. Turning to Gerson’s 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. A publishing world came into being that little resembled the world of thirteenth-century commentaries and classroom debates. Now more than ever, the schoolman became a public figure.7 Hence my model: the schoolman as ‘‘public intellectual.’’8 In a classic study in 1955, Jacques Le Goff called medieval university figures ‘‘intellectuals .’’9 The designation fits perfectly. Licensed theologians belonged to a guild—the original and enduring meaning of universitas. Through their training they mastered a set of Latin texts comprising the sum of learning in the Christian...

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