Abstract
In 1423, John Gerson famously denounced ascetic women who claimed to receive divinely inspired visions with such vivid language that he has been credited with inspiring the anti-witch writings of John Nider, and then, through Nider, the Malleus Malefi carum.1 In his treatise titled De examinatione doctrinarum (On the examination of doctrine), Gerson denounced such women for attempting to address “great and wonderful” topics that exceeded their abilities, reporting the effects of brain lesions caused by epilepsy and melancholy as miracles, and claiming to speak directly for God through unmediated revelations. The men who were foolish enough to let themselves be taught by these women, he warned, nourished themselves in such a way that they might find themselves obeying the devil incarnate as they should obey their own superiors.2 In this and other warnings, which occur throughout Gerson’s writings, Gerson contributed to a discourse that thoroughly discredited the very notion of uneducated ascetic women’s ability to commune with the divine or their capacity to speak with any authority on contemporary intellectual or political matters.3
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Notes
Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, “Late Medieval ‘Counseling’: Jean Gerson (1363–1419) as a Family Pastor,” Journal of Family History, 29 (2004): 153–167, and “Late Medieval Control of Masculinity: Jean Gerson,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 98, no. 3–4 (2003): 418–437. This depiction of Gerson conforms to Barbara Newman’s depiction of pastors of demoniacs acting as communally important counselors who helped disturbed individuals fit into their communities. See Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit,” 740–749. It also conforms to Miri Rubin’s portrayal of Gerson as someone concerned with mitigating the schism’s effects on the practical concerns of everyday living.
See Miri Rubin, “Europe Remade: Purity and Danger in Late Medieval Europe,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 11 (2001): 101–116.
Dyan Elliott, “Authorizing a Life: The Collaboration of Dorothea of Montau and John Marienwerder,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 168–191, esp. 90.
See Brian Patrick McGuire, Jean Gerson and the Last European Reformation (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 291–295 and 316.
See Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, “Gerson’s Legacy,” in A Companion to Jean Gerson, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 371–375.
Jean Gerson, Early Works, ed. and trans., Brian Patrick McGuire (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 455–456, no. 1.
Brian Patrick McGuire, “Jean Gerson and Traumas of Masculine Affectivity and Sexuality,” in Confl icted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 51–58.
Peter Brown, “Asceticism: Pagan and Christian”, in The Late Empire, AD 337–425, ed. Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey, The Cambridge Ancient History vol. 13 (Cambridge, 2000), 601–631.
Mary Edsall, “Like Wise Master Builders: Jean Gerson’s Ecclesiology, Lectio Divina, and Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames,” Medievalia et Humanistica, N.S. 27 (2000), 33–56
For Gerson’s concerns regarding the sexual temptation female penitents presented to their confessors, see Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 14–60.
G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes, Jean Gerson Apostle of Unity: His Church Politics and Ecclesiology, trans. J.C. Grayson (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 317–318.
Moshe Sluhovsky, “Discernment of Difference, the Introspective Subject, and the Birth of Modernity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 36, no. 1 (2006): 181.
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© 2015 Nancy McLoughlin
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McLoughlin, N. (2015). Gerson, Mystics, and Witches?. In: Jean Gerson and Gender. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488831_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488831_6
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