Proving Woman (64 page)

I believe she spoke the truth as she was humbled enough by the distress of her limbs. After this, she was led back to the
tower where she was kept captive. In the evening of the same day, we visited the wretch (I and my companion) at the order
of the lord archdeacon. She was scarcely able to move from pain. Moreover she began to wail in our faces and boldly to plead
how gravely she was harmed. Then we, considering that she was humbled and already anticipating us, told her various accounts
of how many remarkable and learned men were deceived by incautious revelations and seduced through the angel Satan, and of
how fragile the female sex was. Aided by the testimony of Scripture, we persuaded her in many ways. Then through the grace
of Christ she began to recover and to promise that she wished to follow me and my companion in all things. Therefore she believed
that she was deceived and purged her soul to me through sacramental confession spontaneously concerning all the things she
had committed from youth. She exhibited herself publicly revokingher error and did penance. And the third day afterward in
the city of Regensburg, with much weeping for joy and mercy, she performed all the aforesaid things to completion.

Obstinate avoidance of the regular discipline of sacramental confession was corrected by a “judicious” application of torture,
which, in turn, produced contrition, “spontaneous” confession, conversion, and public penance. The citizens of the community
wept to witness so moving a reconciliation enacted within their midst.

In this episode the two kinds of confession are seamlessly joined, as are the clergy’s pastoral and coercive functions. Again,
this corresponds to the ideology of the inquisitorial manuals. Ugolini had urged the use of every rhetorical means at hand
in order to make a heretic return to the faith. But were these to fail, the inquisitor should not flinch from resorting to
compulsion, adapting the priest’s medicinal function to this end:

Because . . . such a one was baptized and is bound to the catholic faith, and ought to be compelled to observe and worship
it. . . . And this is like the example of a frenzied individual [
phrenetici
], who is bound by the doctor: and the lethargic person, whom the doctor stimulates by torturing. . . . And the bishop and
the inquisitor are held to this by the responsibility of their office, who like the shepherd guards his sheep, and gathers
up the strays, and leads them back. . . .Because they indeed should imprison, bind, torture, and afflict his body.
⁶

The physical proofs once used to ensure the reality of a woman’s mystical gifts had given way to the more ancient proof of
torture, corresponding to the ways in which many of the clergy’s perception of these gifts had changed. As the two types of
confession draw closer together, eventually converging, the barriers separating correction, coercion, and even compassion
begin to disintegrate.

Gerson cannot be held responsible for the faltering fortunes of women’s spirituality. His contribution was simply to articulate
forcefully an apprehension about mystical experiences that was already widespread among the clergy, and then to gesture to
the most obvious and up-to-date safe-guard against deception: the inquisitional procedure. It is doubtful that he would have
recognized the tribunal he envisaged in the trials described above. That Gerson’s works on spiritual discernment were bound
and circulated amid treatises written for the persecution of witches was perhaps the most tragic of his unintended effects.

¹
Bernard Basin,
De artibus magicis ac magorum maleficiis opus praeclarissimum sacrelegis
disquisitoris magistri bernardi basin cesaraugustanensis ecclesie canonicum nuper amendis quam
plurimis emendatum
(Paris: Denis Roce, 1506),
propositio
10.

²
Anonymous interpolation from Gerson’s
De examinatione doctrinarum
, in
Joannis Gersonii
opera omnia
, ed. L. Ellies du Pin (Antwerp: Sumptibus societatis, 1706), vol. 1, cols. 19–20.

³
Anne Schutte supposes that this was Gerson’s own work (
Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness,
Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618
–
1750
[Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001], p. 44).

⁴
On similar claims made by other female mystics, see chap. 2, p. 77, above.

⁵
Nider,
Formicarium
3.7 (Douai: B. Belleri, 1602), p. 226.

⁶
Zanchino Ugolini,
Tractatus de haereticis
c. 33, in
Tractatus universi iuris
, ed. Camillo Campeggi (Venice: Franciscus Zilettus, 1584), fol. 263v.

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