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Chapter 1 Gerson as Bookman Prescribing ‘‘the Common School of Theological Truth’’ In 1426 a Carthusian monk named Michael Hartrut wrote Gerson asking for advice about books.1 It was just the kind of question Gerson liked, and he replied with On Books a Monk Should Read. At the work’s close he speaks adoringly of Bonaventure’s Breviloquium and Journey of the Mind to God (Itinerarium mentis ad Deum): ‘‘I confess in my foolishness that for thirty years and more I have desired to possess [habere] these treatises as my friends, often reading and ruminating upon them, even their words, let alone their meaning. And lo, even at my age and with all my leisure, I have just begun to taste the things which, repeated often, become ever new and pleasant to me, as Horace says of an elegant poem or image: ‘It will please though repeated ten times over.’’’2 While strictly speaking a summary of theology, the Breviloquium is also a lyrical masterpiece that moves deductively through the Godhead to creation, sin, the Incarnation, grace, the sacraments, and the Last Judgment . Bonaventure intended this survey as a moral exhortation to help the reader to salvation.3 The Journey of the Mind to God, a meditation on the ways of seeing God, charts a reverse course from the created world to God’s being and the mystical union. Specialists are not the only ones who read these works today. Yet even though both have been translated into English several times, I suspect that few medievalists have read a single word of either one. We cannot therefore comprehend the thrill of reading in this passage. If Gerson were talking about Cicero, perhaps. But Bonaventure tasks our imagination. His description of reading, on the other hand, feels quite familiar. It anticipates Machiavelli’s famous description of his encounter with the classics in his letter to Francesco Vettori. Casting off dusty clothing and putting on royal garments, Machiavelli enters ‘‘the venerable courts of the ancients . . . unashamed to converse with them.’’4 Like the humanists, Gerson speaks of reading as an intimate and personal encounter, rolling the words around in his mind. Like the humanists, he read for pleasure, recommended the reading of whole books in the Gerson as Bookman 19 original, and often considered the historical context of a work. He lived (in Gilbert Ouy’s phrase) ‘‘surrounded by books.’’5 Gerson talked about them like a connoisseur. Hear him describe them: the ‘‘common summa’’ On Virtues, with its ‘‘most lovely and profound reasons’’ why the path of virtues is ‘‘more delightful, more sweet, quiet, and pleasant’’; On the Twelve Fruits of Tribulation, ‘‘finely composed ’’; Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, ‘‘very useful and elegant’’; Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, ‘‘choice, compact, and splendid’’; Concerning Dispensation and Precept of Bernard, On Friendship of Cicero, On True Religion of Augustine, and On the Twelve Patriarchs of Richard of St. Victor, each one ‘‘altogether lovely’’ (pulcherrimum).6 The figures and images in Hugh of St. Victor’s On Ecclesiastes and Jan van Ruysbroeck’s Spiritual Espousals struck Gerson for their beauty. He admired the brevity in books like Pseudo-Bonaventure’s Mirror of Love and Hugh of St. Victor ’s On Prayer. He marveled at the ‘‘matchless eloquence’’ of Cicero in the Paradoxes.7 Someone who talks this way about books is responding not just to their arguments or contents but also to their literary qualities. In this respect, the term bookman applies better to Gerson than to Thomas Aquinas. Problems appear when we try to locate Gerson in the history of reading . Scholars of humanism have made a shift in reading practices central to claims about a new historical consciousness that appeared at the Renaissance. Summarizing the work of Erwin Panofsky, Hans Baron, and Eugenio Garin, Anthony Grafton wrote that medieval scholars ‘‘had read a canonical set of authorities . . . in a uniform way. For all their differences of origin and substance, medieval readers considered these texts the components of a single system. Official interpreters made all of them serve as the basis for the system of argument and instruction known as scholasticism. They did so, quite simply, by treating the texts not as the work of individuals who had lived in a particular time and place but as impersonal bodies of propositions.’’8 The humanists, by contrast, restored ‘‘individual reading to a place of honor’’ and recommended ‘‘direct contact with original works.’’9 This assumption of a sharp break in reading practices should...

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