GERSON’S STANCE ON WOMEN

Wendy Love Anderson

The Mirror of His Time

Perhaps the most frequently repeated truism about Jean Gerson is

the characterization of him as “a mirror of his time.” However, the
second most frequently repeated truism of recent gersonian scholar-
ship has come to view Gerson as potentially ahead of his time, albeit
not in the most positive sense of the term: the erstwhile chancellor
has been identified as a leader in the late medieval ecclesiastical
backlash against politically powerful women in general and female
visionaries in particular. The notion that Gerson viewed female vision-
aries with disfavor is hardly new: in his 1706 edition of Gerson’s
works, the French historian Louis Ellies Du Pin stated that multa
adjicit Gersonius contra doctrinas mulierum, eorumque visiones.1 However, the
scholarly work of the last decade has placed Du Pin’s insight in a
different framework and credited Gerson with a positively novel
degree of gender bias, helping to end a late medieval age of oppor-
tunity for female visionaries seeking to reform the Church. As Dyan
Elliott writes in a recent monograph, “Gerson was the first to diag-
nose a certain kind of spiritual duplicity or deception as a woman’s
problem. . . . [T]his diagnosis was in no way implicit in the discourse
that he had inherited.”2 Jo Ann McNamara explains that Gerson
“took the lead in advancing the revived claims of the hierarchy,” a
hierarchy which ultimately united in the fifteenth-century “disap-
proval of female mysticism.”3 Nancy Caciola describes Gerson as
writing against “the Church’s recent effeminate degradation” and

1
Louis Ellies Du Pin, Joannes Gersonii Omnia Opera (Antwerp, 1706), IV.98.
2
Dyan Elliot, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitorial Culture in the Later
Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 270.
3
Jo Ann McNamara, “The Rhetoric of Orthodoxy: Clerical Authority and Female
Innovation in the Struggle with Heresy,” in Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious
Experience of Medieval Women Mystics, ed. Ulrike Wiethaus (Syracuse, N.Y., 1993),
24–25.
294 wendy love anderson

insisting that “male assent to female leadership had wrought unpar-

alleled devastation upon the Church.”4 Barbara Newman refers to
Gerson’s “general distrust of visionary women.”5 Indeed, some schol-
ars have begun to take Gerson’s negative stance on female vision-
aries as a given, building on that assumption in order to characterize
his broader position against females and the feminine throughout
Christianity.6
The details of Gerson’s position on women—and especially on
female visionaries—are considerably more complex, as several of the
above studies acknowledge. The following essay will argue that a
straightforward view of Gerson as hostile to female visionaries (much
less to women in general) takes a limited and therefore deeply prob-
lematic view of Gerson’s much more nuanced attitudes and exten-
sive writings on the subject. Although few would describe him as a
proto-feminist, Gerson seems to have dealt well and even sensitively
with women in his life and with several works written by or about
women. His negative examples of female visionaries gone astray are
few and far between, and they usually serve some broader rhetori-
cal or polemic purpose. They must also be considered alongside
Gerson’s use of discernment tactics which had previously found
expression in works written by or about female visionaries, as well
as his frequent citations of women alongside men as examples of not
only well-behaved visionaries, but also proper discerners of spirits.
Finally, passages dealing with female visionaries and the teachings
of women must be read within the larger context of the treatises in
which they occur and the time in which they were written. Ultimately,
Gerson’s recurring emphasis on gender-neutral spiritual experience
as the best way to distinguish true from false revelations can even
be seen to undermine his statements of support for the (all-male)
ecclesiastical hierarchy as the supreme authority in such matters and

4
Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages
(Ithaca, N.Y., 2003), 289.
5
Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean To Say ‘I Saw’”?: The Clash Between
Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (2005), 41.
6
For instance, in Barbara Newman’s God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry and Belief
in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2003), which will be discussed in more detail below;
or in Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the
Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (Rochester, N.Y., 1999), in which Gerson’s
view of female visionaries is seen as contributing to a larger “misogynistic culture”
(67).