Proving Woman (57 page)

Yet Peter was hardly alone in recognizing that when male mechanisms of power were at an impasse, women should be not only
empowered but even obliged to step forward. Medieval society at large had various tacit and expressed ways of acknowledging
this phenomenon. Hildegard of Bingen had justified her prophetic mission by articulating how God, no longer able to rely on
corrupt men, had actually turned to frail women as vessels for the divine word.
²⁷
The queen’s role as mediator in the later Middle Ages was often a way out of the gridlock of high politics. 28 Women’s mystical
involvement in the papal schism and the Hundred Years War, clearly the most public of female visionary interventions to date,
are but illustrations of how turmoil and structural instability opened the way to female speech.
²⁹

But far from resulting in peace, female interventions often protracted existing difficulties or generated new ones. For instance,
in 1384 Constance of Rabastens, hailing from the dangerous region of Albi, that former bastion of the Cathar heresy, posited
that France might, in fact, be mistaken in its allegiance to the Avignon papacy. Convinced that the Roman contender was the
true pontiff, Constance appealed to the count of Foix to install the correct pope and lead King Charles VI in a conquest of
the Holy Land.
³⁰
Bridget of Sweden fits into this bothersome profile—indeed, she surpasses her predecessors in general noisomeness (at least
from Gerson’s perspective) by backing the English in the Hundred Years War in two celebrated revelations.
³¹

Gerson’s
adfeminam
approach to discernment was also linked to his aspirations for the scholar and the university at large. Gerson had periodically
acknowledged that illiterates, particularly women, often outstripped the learned cleric in contemplative gifts.
³²
Although he was prepared to grant this apparent advantage among the unlearned, it was nevertheless an ongoing source of consternation
and even chagrin. Thus Gerson acknowledges, “For even uneducated wretched little women and ignorant people who cannot read
or write [
etiam mulierculae et idiotae sine litteris
] have the capacity of ascending to and obtaining this type of contemplation, assuming a simple faith. It is much easier for
them than for men of great intelligence who are learned in theology.”
³³
Later, however, Gerson recoiled from the thought that the intricacies of what he referred to as “mystical theology” should
be vetted in popular for a. “Are [these matters] to be made public, now in writings, now in talk in the vernacular language
among servants, uneducated youths, slow-witted old people, the uneducated crowd, broken-down old women, at one time in the
market-place, at another in the back streets? Are men who are quite learned, both in ability and training, to be kept from
speaking about such matters because they are schoolmen?”
³⁴
His defensiveness on behalf of scholastic prerogative was additionally colored by his desire to reform the university by promoting
his special brand of academic mysticism and simultaneously suppressing the unhealthy scholarly curiosity that he so roundly
despised.
³⁵
To this end, he had begun lecturing on mysticism already in 1402 and writing scholarly treatises on the subject.
³⁶
Moreover, at the end of the Council of Constance, when his efforts to destabilize Bridget’s reputation for sanctity proved
unsuccessful, Gerson composed several treatises discrediting the sensory visions that were the cornerstone of female mysticism.
³⁷
Thus he argues that deep meditative imaginings on corporeal things can lead to insanity. Abetted by demonic interpolation,
inner and outer objects become indistinguishable, and such fantasies lead to profound confusion and error so that “either
in the elevation of the body of Christ or in another of their reveries they judge that they really saw Christ crucified or
in some other corporeal form.”
³⁸
Sensitive to what he must have perceived as one of the more pernicious of scholarly quibbles, Gerson deliberately opposed
the view that a person was exculpated or, worse still, won merit in worshiping a demonic Christ. Such a misapprehension was
a mortal sin—a position that contrasts with Gerson’s more forgiving view regarding the papal schism when he argues that good
intentions would be credited.
³⁹

For all practical purposes, Gerson’s strategies for containment of rogue scholars and female mystics alike were inseparable.
Both groups were afflicted by the same failings. Curiosity and a love of novelty were destroying academic inquiry, thereby
weakening the faith; the female mystic’s parallel curiosity and love of novelty, failings she shared with her overindulgent
clerical advisers, in addition to jeopardizing her own soul, were giving rise to public scandal and likewise undermining the
faith. From this perspective, Gerson’s conflation of the two issues into a single exemplum is especially revealing. In the
same treatise in which we encounter the sophistical Satan, Gerson goes on to argue that Satan’s skill in theology was especially
apparent in the persona of the prophetess who attempted to validate the mission of Paul and his apostles—a gesture of goodwill
that they, of course, spurned (Acts 16.16). But, as Gerson points out, by checking her authority, Paul was simultaneously
undermining her financial value to her patrons. Their reaction was to persecute Paul and his companions with gusto. Gerson
likens clerics who promote “the false miracles and revelations of these wretched little women” to the spiritual pimps from
Acts.
⁴⁰
Such dangerous tendencies could be arrested, however, by an appropriate reapplication of scholarly interest to a more vigorous
form of mystical contemplation—one in which the discernment of spirits constituted the cornerstone. Scholarly curiosity would
thus be rechanneled into suppressing rather than abetting female mystical curiosity.

What Gerson was proposing was something like a hostile male “take-over” of an area of considerable female accomplishment,
comparable to the way in which male artisans crowded women out of female-dominated crafts, once they became lucrative.
⁴¹
In this context, it should be reiterated that his guidelines require that an assessor of mystical phenomena have the advantage
of both practical experience and theological training. This set of requirements would, by necessity, exclude women, who were
barred from the universities. Interestingly, the experiential criterion may very well have excluded Gerson, who never claims
that he himself was the recipient of mystical experiences.
⁴²
But the fact that he did not disqualify himself as a judge suggests that theological training is really what counted, even
though this flies in the face of the apostolic designation of spiritual discernment as a gift of the spirit (1 Cor. 12.10).
Indeed, Gerson even posited that those entirely lacking in experience with mystical phenomena might make the best judges—a
situation that he likens to the superiority of the medical theorist over the practitioner, or to the lot of a blind man whose
enhanced powers of cognitive reasoning exist in proportion to the extent of his visual impairment.
⁴³
That no parallel claims were to be allowed for the purely experiential side is clear from Gerson’s account of a woman, “a
prophetess and a maker of miracles,” whom he met. In response to his question about how she knew that her spirit was annihilated
and entirely recreated in the course of contemplation, she answered that she had experienced it—an answer that Gerson clearly
regarded as so ludicrous that it required no further comment.
⁴⁴
In short, Gerson was training what Foucault might describe as a “fellowship of discourse” animated by the “prodigious machinery
of the will to truth with its vocation of exclusion.”
⁴⁵
This team of professionals would be equipped to pronounce on the validity of female religious experience, with a view toward
containment.
⁴⁶

Thus far the focus has been on the possible motives informing Gerson’s prejudice against female mystical expression. But
there were also a number of methodological and ideological constructs that shaped the way in which this bias manifested itself.
Of paramount importance was the level of contestation integral to scholastic discourse. Gerson was clearly critical of many
perceived abuses of scholasticism. Aware of the inescapable violence inherent in scholastic discourse, Gerson further denounced
the often pointless aggression that such methods fostered. His treatise
One Hundred
Utterances concerning Impulses
condemns the urge toward deception rife among preachers and writers, which Gerson associates with a “shameless fantasy that
. . . seeks machinations for conquest.”
⁴⁷

Of course, this apprehension over the dangers of scholasticism did not interfere with Gerson’s own deft deployment of incisive
rhetorical weaponry. As discussed above, all scholars trained in dialectic were adept at subverting any positive “case” by
arguing to the opposite purpose, and Gerson was no exception. The
adfeminam
twist to Gerson’s discourse on discernment is a case in point:
On the Proving of Spirits
is basically a reworking of a treatise
defending
the inspiration of Bridget’s revelations, a work written by her confessor and literary executor, Alphonse of Pecha (d. 1389).
⁴⁸
In essence, scholastic argumentation leaves a shadow text of discarded or disproved tenets that invite ingenious appropriation.
Gerson’s subversion was skilled, but routine. Yet a shadow text can, as we shall see, coalesce and take shape in much more
alarming and unpredictable ways.

In tandem with the scholarly apparatus associated with Gerson’s theological training was the ongoing penetration of the inquisitional
process into many different areas of Christian life, a process facilitated in learned circles by the remarkable symmetry between
the
disputatio
and the
inquisitio
. It was but a matter of course that Gerson would look to an inquisitorial tribunal to discipline and reform errant scholars
and mystics alike, a parallelism that is particularly stressed in the treatise
On the Examination
of Doctrine
, discussed below.

Gerson’s frequent appeals to the medical tradition further shaped his writings. As we have seen, he was prepared to grant
that women were possessed of greater piety than men. In keeping with his adherence to the Platonic dictum that “souls follow
bodies,” Gerson assigned a physiological reason for women’s spiritual aptitude. He thus enlists the principal affections issuing
from the powers of the soul, a concept also derived from Plato, to explain spiritual dispositions. Women were dominated by
the concupiscible power, as opposed to the rational or the irascible. Thus women were reckoned as softhearted and easily drawn
into contemplation through a consideration of Christ’s passion, God’s love, or the joys and sufferings of saints’ lives, hence
“often called pious and devout.”
⁴⁹
But this propensity was a mixed blessing. For throughout the corpus of Gerson’s work he stressed over and over again the danger
of the contemplative life’s devolving into melancholia, phantasms, and mania.
⁵⁰

There are also certain hierarchical and philosophical considerations to Gerson’s discourse. By isolating woman per se as more
prone to error, and thus particularly requiring pastoral vigilance, Gerson was following the structural logic of his own thrust
toward exemplification. The learned, male, clerical judge calls out for its counterpart: the unlearned, female, lay, defendant.
⁵¹
Insofar as this pairing corresponded to the contours of his prescribed hierarchy in discernment, this was a logical and controlled
benefit of Gerson’s marked tendency to use women as exempla.

Finally, the implications of casting women as negative exemplars necessarily reached beyond the compass of Gerson’s work to
the larger discursive terrain of misogyny. The general outlines of this discourse are familiar to us all.
⁵²
First, there is the polarization in representations of women. Even as abstract and frequently positive concepts like philosophy,
wisdom, or truth tend toward female representation, so instances of folly seek reification in a female subject.Woman’s capacity
for negative exemplarity is not only conditioned by her perceived overembodiment, as implied by her reproductive capacity.
It is also buttressed by theological and medical traditions that saw woman as a “bad copy” of man—hence the familiar bent
rib syndrome.
⁵³
Moreover, the fall of humanity was, arguably, predicated on the inadequacy of Eve’s faculty of discernment in the first place,
a defect that rendered her an easy mark for the predatory suasions of Lucifer. In short, once Gerson moved the tradition of
spiritual discernment in the direction he did, the very weight of woman’s mottled representational legacy would open the way
to unlimited elaboration. The momentum would make this development difficult to resist, let alone reverse. In fact, there
was no mechanism for its reversal, since there was no alternative to substitute for woman as an ideal type of negatively valenced
weak-minded carnality. As a result, the literature of spiritual discernment would become the prisoner of the misogynistic
tradition: woman would come to embody the duplicity or “doubleness” that was afflicting Christendom, and would thus become
the target for its doubts and self-loathing.

As his first-person exempla suggest, Gerson’s efforts on discernment were frequently put into practice. His reputation as
a reliable assessor seems already to have been established in 1401 or 1402, when he received an appeal from the prior of the
abbey of Saint-Denys of Reims, John Morel, concerning the recently deceased holy woman Ermine of Reims.
⁵⁴
Gerson’s response to this case establishes a strategy that will recur in his later dealings with female mystics, particularly
Joan of Arc.
⁵⁵
Morel was very anxious to have Gerson’s reactions to the record of the life and visions of Ermine. A model of scholarly method,
Gerson’s analysis is shaped into three conclusions (which, in turn, keep dividing down into triplicates), all of which are
devoted to limitation, containment, and damage control. In the first conclusion, Gerson posits that the book contains nothing
contrary to Scripture, while similar occurrences are found in the lives of the fathers. Second, although the contents of her
visions were not essential to an individual’s salvation, “I think, nevertheless, that it is rash and crude to insist on dissenting
from such things or to attack them with stubborn ill will.”
⁵⁶
Third, the book should not be widely circulated but should be limited to those who would be edified by its contents. The restricted
audience is called for, allegedly, out of respect for the book’s contents: “so that what is holy not be cast to the dogs,
as pearls are thrown before swine (Matt. 7.6).” An ideal audience would consist of “those who are stable in their way of life
and concerned with their own salvation”—in other words, individuals who could easily dispense with such a model.
⁵⁷
Against her supernatural foes, Ermine is fortified by a triplicate set of virtues. The first is her profound humility, which
stimulated “a most passionate and conscientious awareness of her own weakness and imperfection.” Second, her life demonstrates
the ultimate safety that an unwavering faith imparts. Third, her prudent but unlearned simplicity is particularly commended:
“an untaught wisdom, which does not depend on its own prudence but does all things with counsel (Prov. 13.10).”
⁵⁸
In the context of Gerson’s subsequent treatises on discernment, this final characteristic may be seen as the cornerstone to
his approval: truly ignorant, but knows it! Docile, and ductile, she can do no harm.