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

REVIEWS 264 of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. At its narrowest, the book offers acute interpretations of key passages taken from the works in question. At its broadest , it is a history of what Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a collaborative fantasy between society and the literature of civic values that shapes and provides the material grounds of culture (ix). For Elias, the locus of this process lay in courtesy manuals, while for Heyworth, it lies in romance, a genre that raises the question of form and best comprehends Ovid’s notions of metamorphosis and the fundamental instability literature shares with culture. HEATHER SOTTONG, Italian, UCLA Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2009) 320 pp., ill. In Authorship and Publicity Before Print, historian Daniel Hobbins argues that Jean Gerson’s writings reveal a self-conscious reflexivity about reading, writing , and publishing manuscripts. Hobbins suggests that Gerson’s concern about writing mirrors the surge in manuscript production in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while his specific arguments about reading and writing practices both mirror and contribute to a distinctive, late medieval culture in which the theologian’s role exceeds the boundaries of the university. Hobbins explores the theme of writing in Gerson’s works with the broader aim of complicating the well-established, albeit increasingly-questioned, divisions between manuscript and print culture and between medieval scholasticism and Renaissance humanism. The result is an engaging and provocative contribution to scholarship in ecclesiastical history, the history of the book, the history of reading, and, of course, the study of Gerson. The first three chapters discuss Gerson’s writings in the context of his ideas about reading. Chapter 1 explores the reading lists Gerson created as chancellor of the University of Paris, with particular attention to Gerson’s descriptions of the act of reading and instructions on how to read particular kinds of books. Here we see strains of humanism in Gerson’s emphasis on reading whole texts rather than excerpts, and in his sense of pleasure and engagement in remarkably silent, private reading. Even as Gerson seeks to direct students to a limited and established set of theological writings, Hobbins explains in chapter 2, he finds ways to justify his own authorship of new works. The task of new authors is to engage moral questions, in quite specific terms, using the theological canon Gerson established. Already this lends to theological writings a broader relevance that points to the possibility of publicity. Chapter 3 is devoted to a “tour” of the very diverse genres in which Gerson wrote during his exile in Lyon (1418–1429). Here Hobbins regrets, on Gerson’s behalf, the latter’s “missed opportunities” or “failure” (73, 100) to author a work that would itself become canonical. Two middle chapters then present the ways in which Gerson cultivated his status as what Hobbins calls a “medieval public intellectual.” In chapter 4, “Literary Expression: Logic, Rhetoric, and Scholarly Vice,” Hobbins explores Gerson’s use of the techniques of rhetoric in his scholarly writing. This chapter contains the most compelling evidence of the challenge Gerson presents to the REVIEWS 265 distinction between humanism and scholasticism. It also helps to explain how a schoolman’s writings might come to engage an audience beyond theologians. Chapter 5 introduces the genre through which Gerson established himself as a writer for a non-academic audience: the tract as tractatulus. To be sure, the tractatus was a well-established genre before Gerson, but Hobbins argues that Gerson takes up and adapts the genre to render it a vehicle for the wider circulation of theological writings. It is helpful, then, to note that Hobbins defines a tract as “a treatment of a single moral case with some connection to the world outside the university in a form brief enough to be easily distributed” (56). Although Hobbins persuasively argues that Gerson attends to an audience beyond the schools, this chapter (and the book as a whole) lacks a convincing description of the composition and size of the audience to which Gerson pitches his tractatuli. Chapters 6 and...