Jean Gerson and Gender

Rhetoric and Politics in Fifteenth-Century France

N. McLoughlin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137488831
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

Jean Gerson and Gender examines the deployment of gendered rhetoric by the influential late medieval politically active theologian, Jean Gerson (1363-1429), as a means of understanding his reputation for political neutrality, the role played by royal women in the French royal court, and the rise of the European witch hunts.

1

Gender, University Authority, and the French Royal Court

When Jean Gerson, the son of a carpenter from a village owned by the Benedictine monastery at Reims, traveled to Paris at the age of 14 in 1377, he embarked upon a career that would be built almost entirely upon his intellectual prowess. This situation differentiated him from those upon whom he would depend for his success and general good fortune, namely those whose claim to power lay in their noble blood, financial resources, military skill, and family connections. Gerson entered Paris as a scholarship student and a potential client.¹ His ability to craft a reputation that allowed him to influence the debates that coursed through that city and the wider context of the church attests to his successful negotiation of multiple social situations and institutional settings as much as it reflects his command of the scholastic tradition.²

Gerson’s negotiation skills won him increasing professional success. He was repeatedly selected to represent the University of Paris to the French royal court, enjoyed the patronage of Philip the Bold (1342–1404) and John the Fearless of Burgundy (r. 1404–1419), the Avignon Pope Benedict XIII (r. 1394–1423), the French Kings Charles VI (r. 1380–1422) and Charles VII (r. 1422–1461). He attended the European-wide Council of Constance (1415–1418) as a member of the French delegation where he delivered his famous sermon, Ambulate dum lucem habetis, which encouraged the council to proceed in the absence of clear papal authority.³ Gerson’s access to these public venues, in turn, allowed him to circulate his ideas in such a way that they would influence European thinking for the subsequent two centuries. In this sense, Gerson contributed to the development of important aspects of European political and religious thought to the extent that he did at least in part because he was invited by those in power to be in the right place at the right time and made good use of every available opportunity to publish his ideas.⁴

His success is all the more impressive because he worked under conditions that seriously challenged the authority claims of the University of Paris and its theologians. In Gerson’s wider cultural context of the long fifteenth-century (1370–1520), the translation of authoritative political and religious texts from Latin into French, widespread interest in courtly and eloquent speech, and the popularity of poetic and allegorical arguments undermined the university’s ability to assert itself as the crown’s most authoritative religious and political advisor.⁵ At the same time, widespread religious experimentation that emphasized the ultimate validity of the internal experience of the practitioner threatened to render the university’s theological arguments as irrelevant to the spiritual life of the laity in a manner that Gerson feared exposed the laity to dangerous unorthodox opinions and practices.⁶ Within this broader cultural context of creativity and competition, which Gerson perceived as a crisis in university authority, two political events further disturbed the university and threatened to diminish its political and religious authority within the kingdom of France and the wider church. These were the Great Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417) and the increased political instability in France that resulted from the long minority (1380–1388) and mental instability (1392–1422) of King Charles VI.⁷

Gerson was able to win the attention of the French royal court and exercise an authoritative voice in French and church politics at least in part through his conscious recognition and manipulation of the gender regimes that governed the different contexts in which he worked. He had no choice in this matter because of the extent to which medieval Europeans expressed their understandings of the multiple relationships between truth and power in such strongly gendered terms.⁸ For this reason, Gerson, who sought to increase the university’s political influence, attempted to revise her political gender. In short, despite favoring male expert consensus as the basis of academic, religious, and political truth, Gerson consistently personified the University of Paris as the female Daughter of the King in the political sermons he delivered before the French royal court. In doing so, he acted similarly to English poets who began personifying political counsel as female as a means of demonstrating that they did not mean to challenge the political authority of those they wished to advise.⁹

This chapter examines the complex strategies Gerson employed as he navigated the tension between the university’s self-ascribed gender identity and the gender identity imposed upon it by the French royal court.¹⁰ It does so primarily for the purpose of demonstrating how Gerson struggled to translate his university authority into a form that was palatable to royal audiences without losing touch with the values he shared with his university audience. In the process, it highlights both the context-driven nature of Gerson’s presentation of the university’s gender and the professional concerns that encouraged him to partially resist the gender dynamics implicit in the university’s relationship with the French royal court. At the same time, this chapter reveals the role played by gender in Gerson’s rise to intellectual prominence. The significance of Gerson’s efforts to renegotiate the university’s gender, however, extends beyond our understanding of Gerson as a thinker and political actor. These efforts reflect his engagement with a longstanding and collectively embraced institutional narrative about the value of masculine scholarly authority.

Contested gender and authority

Gerson struggled to develop a university identity that was palatable to the French royal court because the institutionalized gender his university training instilled in him was aggressively male. Much of the scholarship addressing Gerson’s views on women characterizes him as a typical representative of male clerical bias.¹¹ Gerson, however, experienced and negotiated his clerical identity within an institutional context that closely associated its own particular understanding of masculinity with the production of verifiable truth claims. As Ruth Mazo Karras has demonstrated, university-based masculinity was specific to its context and open to contestation by those who did not ascribe to it, especially male and female aristocrats. Karras argues, for instance, that university members experienced an uncertainty about their own masculinity that mirrored their uncertain position in the surrounding political community. In response to their desire to be seen as fully masculine in comparison to their aristocratic superiors, they sometimes rejected the behavioral codes associated with their clerical status. They dressed outrageously, kept hunting dogs, and proved their masculinity by engaging in consensual and nonconsensual sexual activities with poor women and prostitutes.¹² In this sense, they attempted to behave like knights in a manner similar to that uncovered by Jennifer Thibodeaux in her study of aristocratic members of the Norman clergy, who continued to hunt and have relations with women after they had taken clerical orders. These refusals to embrace clerical masculinity suggest that at least some clergy believed that doing so would make them seem more vulnerable as they attempted to negotiate their daily lives and ecclesiastical careers, whether they undertook those negotiations in competition with each other or in dialogue with more freely masculine secular rulers.¹³

At the same time, Karras has demonstrated that university members throughout Europe developed an alternative understanding of their own masculinity that likened intellectual inquiry and debate to military combat and valued the work of the mind as the highest expression of masculinity. In conjunction with this understanding of their own masculinity and professional worth, university scholars went to great lengths to present the university as being free from all sinful or passionate influences that might interfere with the masculine exercise of reason. They demonstrated their freedom from the passions most pointedly by excluding women physically from university buildings and mentally from the topics they were willing to debate on a regular basis.¹⁴

Moreover, this exclusion of women from university life and thought created a homo-social atmosphere in which the basic day to day activities of university members reinforced the notion that women were socially, politically, and intellectually irrelevant, as well as dangerously distracting. In effect, university members sought to ignore women as much as possible in their debates and daily lives. In fact, these cultural, institutional, and intellectual practices worked together to define women as a repository for everything that university members defined themselves against, namely sin, passion, and a lack of reason. Such sentiments were then reinforced by medieval commentaries on Aristotle’s characterization of women as morally and mentally deficient. In some regions these sentiments were also expressed through initiation rituals that opposed scholarly manliness to an uncultivated and bestial femininity.¹⁵

This emphasis on a hyper-masculine and nearly supernaturally virtuous form of rationality had deep classical roots in the struggle between monks and married clergy for the control of the church, played an important role in the Gregorian Reform, and most importantly, arose specifically as a result of the ongoing struggle between military aristocrats and their clerical counterparts regarding who was best equipped to lead a truly Christian polity.¹⁶ University members and other clergy members were also capable of assuming feminine affective roles in other contexts, but doing so while maintaining the authority to advise kings and prelates required complex strategies that Gerson struggled to develop during the course of his career as a court preacher. The university needed to maintain a sufficiently masculine identity for the purpose of acting within the world of communal politics as an independent agent, rather than as a subordinate member of the king’s household who lacked an independent voice.¹⁷ The Duke of Orléans emphasized this point when he rebuked a peace embassy the university sent to him with the remark that just as the university did not invite knights to councils regarding matters of the faith, that it should stay out of war. Moreover, he continued, “if the university is called the Daughter of the King, nevertheless, it is not seemly for her to insert herself into the governing of the realm.”¹⁸ In fact, Jacques Verger suggests that Charles V imposed the title “Daughter of the King” upon the university as part of his attempt to control it.¹⁹

Adopting a female persona also challenged Gerson’s understanding of the university’s identity. As the university had developed as a collective of self-governing and self-regulating experts brought together through an oath of mutual loyalty and obedience to the corporation’s statutes, it secured its privileges to self-government, tax exemptions, and preferential juridical treatment through papal and royal decrees.²⁰ The resulting decrees, which university members repeatedly consulted, contributed to the perception that the church leadership, as well as the imagined Christian polity as a whole, depended upon well-trained male scholars working in community for their invaluable and doctrinally sound counsel.²¹

For instance, in his bull Quanto Gallicana (c. 1170–1172), Pope Alexander III denounced the chancellor of Notre Dame for refusing to “grant the license to teach others to ecclesiastical men without a fixed price” because such refusals damaged the integrity of the French church, which “shines by means of the learning and integrity of great persons.”²² While Alexander addressed scholars who had not yet founded a university, Pope Gregory IX expressed similar sentiments about the university in the papal bull Parens scientiarum, which he issued in 1231 as a means of reaffirming the university’s value to the church following a long protracted strike the university had undertaken to protest the violence it had suffered at the hands of the provost of Paris.²³ Parens scientiarum played a foundational role in shaping the University of Paris’ understanding of its own position in the late medieval church by calling it “wisdom’s special workshop” in which “wise men” adorn “the Bride of Christ” with gold and precious stones while simultaneously extracting iron from the earth to make “the breastplate of the faith, the sword of the spirit, and other things, from which is made the armor of the Christian army, mighty against the aerial powers.”²⁴

Parens scientiarum reinforced the most central aspects of the university’s identity that had grown out of the processes through which a collection of like-minded scholars convinced kings and popes to recognize their organization’s independent and yet crucial role in society through their response to a particular conflict. Since Parens scientiarum had been granted at the end of a successful strike, it instilled in university members a deep appreciation for the value of institutional loyalty, careful professionalization, and scholarly consensus. The resulting corporate identity also reflected the cooperative manner of pursuing truth through question and debate that characterized scholastic learning. Individual participants may have engaged in scholastic debate as an agonistic activity that they described through the use of military metaphors, but the power of the scholastic boycott demonstrated that such debates only produced universally valid truth claims within the context of a well-defined debating community.²⁵

Moreover, as university statutes governing dress, funeral attendance, curriculum, teaching careers, and exams all demonstrate, the university’s value was derived from its ability to produce individuals who embodi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Gendering Gerson
• 1 Gender, University Authority, and the French Royal Court
• 2 Charity, Pride, and Patronage
• 3 Inspired by Princess Isabelle
• 4 Co-opting Royal Women’s Authority
• 5 Gerson, Mystics, and Witches?
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index