Proving Woman (60 page)

According to an anonymous summary of Joan’s trial of condemnation, produced around 1500, Gerson’s assessment of Joan was registered
at the proceedings as an authoritative and dissenting voice that contradicted the other theologians from Paris, who are described
as condemning her “to flatter and please the king of England.” But this account was penned with all the obstinate blindness
of wishful hindsight, recasting history in light of Joan’s recent trial of rehabilitation, undertaken in 1450, at which Gerson’s
treatise was produced.
¹⁰⁵
In fact, Gerson’s treatise, which could more securely argue the claims of a dead than of a living defendant, had finally found
its rightful audience. But given Latin Christendom’s age-old cavils against the veneration of a living person, as long as
Joan lived, Gerson’s treatise—with its explicit alignment of Joan’s activities with the deeds of saints—played into the hands
of her enemies.

The antagonistic relation between Gerson and his anonymous critic reenacts the forces of bifurcation at work in Christendom
in general and in the realm of female spirituality in particular. The conflict itself sketched out the possibility of two
Joans: the one pious, good, and inspired by God; the other evil, depraved, and demonically inspired. This possibility was
ultimately realized in a flesh-and-blood double. In 1436, five years after Joan’s execution at the hands of a pro-English
heretical inquisitional tribunal, the celebrated “false Joan” emerged. A female warrior, initially calling herself Claude
but eventually appropriating Joan’s name and even her identity, managed to convince a number of people, including Joan’s (one
can only believe) craven brothers, that she had miraculously evaded death.
¹⁰⁶
The false Joan’s status as “real” also sustains an interesting double entendre: sufficient contemporaneous sources assure
us that she did, in fact, exist. And yet the false Joan could be construed as a discursive remainder—confected from language’s
inability to exhaust the recesses of the Lacanian “Real.”
¹⁰⁷

The false Joan was active between 1436 and 1440. But already around 1437, well before her drama had played itself out, John
Nider’s extremely influential
Formicarium
attempted to absorb and resecure the anomaly that she represented within the literature of spiritual discernment. Nider’s
Formicarium
was intended to alert the clerical community to the many kinds of spiritual and moral depravity on the loose in contemporary
Christendom. The rubric introducing the category under which Joan was to be discussed suggests how her example would be mobilized
in the context of the work’s pastoral aims:

How venereal delectation ought to be fled. Concerning women under a virile form saying publicly that they have been sent by
God. And concerning the three things that rarely hold the middle: the tongue, an ecclesiastic, and a woman, who in good things
is best but in bad things becomes the worst.
¹⁰⁸

Beginning with a disquisition on how certain ants feed on cadavers, a predilection he likens to those who enjoy perverse lusts,
Nider further associates such practices with men who are attracted to the female sinner. “The Disciple” of the dialogue is
suddenly inspired to ask, “Are there in our time any good men deceived by magicians or witches, according to your judgment?”
This question directly prompts Theologus to respond with an anecdote he had heard recently from his confrere the inquisitor
Henry Kalteisen about “Claude,” the False Joan. First appearing in Cologne, this cross-dressed woman conducted herself as
a man in revelry and in arms. Interestingly, she offered to intervene in a contemporary episcopal case of doubling: “At that
time the church see of Trier had two men contending for it, and was gravely troubled, and she boasted that she was willing
and able to enthrone one of the parties; just as the virgin Joan (about whom immediately it was said) did with the French
King Charles a little earlier, confirming him in his own kingdom. Indeed, the woman affirmed she was that same Joan, revived
by God.”
¹⁰⁹
Our female warrior’s general demeanor, compounded by certain magical tricks she liked to play, attracted the attention of
the aforementioned inquisitor. She very soon beat a hasty retreat, first into France where she married a knight, but then
moving on to Metz, where she became a priest’s concubine, “which clearly showed by which spirit she was led.” With no further
ado, Nider enters into his summary of Joan of Arc’s career. The “original” Joan is thus presented as a sequel to the “false”
Joan. Nider, however, characteristically recuses himself from passing explicit judgment on the “original” Joan. Instead, he
foregrounds Joan as a disputed question, in need of resolution: “Laypeople, clerics, and monks all were in doubt as to what
spirit ruled her, diabolical or divine.”
¹¹⁰
Joan has, in fact, literally and metaphorically been “framed” in such a way that the reader almost has to pronounce against
her. In a certain sense, the rhetorically constrained reader has been “framed” as well, forced to do the work of the inquisitor.

As representative of the literature of spiritual discernment, Nider’s
Formicarium
prolongs many Gersonian initiatives.
¹¹¹
Peopled by Nider’s acquaintances, conveying their reminiscences as well as his own, is a veritable tabloid of contemporary
spiritual events. But, as with the modern tabloid, one has to remember that what is more accessible is not necessarily uncomplicated
in its affiliations and final effects. Nider’s engagement with the contemporary instance of these widely celebrated doubles
draws upon some of the most sophisticated discursive practices of his day. He relies upon the convention of scholarly detachment,
which was so important to Gerson, by refusing to choose between the two Joans. Indeed, his bifurcated depiction is generated
by those forms of scholastic argument that encourage the production of a monstrous opposite as the double of any positive
representation.

This bifurcation—explored in Gerson’s defense of Joan and its anonymous opposite—may be glimpsed in Nider just as it once
again disappears from view. For the interdependence of the positive and negative Joans raises the likelihood of their ultimate
reconvergence. In Nider’s rendition, the distance between the false Joan and the “authentic” Joan of Arc finally disappears,
as these inherently unstable positive and negative binaries dissolve into a single flawed entity. The lost possibility of
Joan’s authentic and uncorrupted spirituality coincides with the first stages of a more pervasive effacement of Europe’s faith
in positive female spirituality.

¹
Birger Bergh, ed.,
Sancta Birgitta Revelaciones Book V
(Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksells, 1971), pp. 97–98; trans. by Albert Kezel,
Birgitta of Sweden: Life and Selected Revelations
(New York: Paulist Press, 1990), p. 101.

²
Note that Christ characterizes the monk’s questions as
inquisicio tua
(ibid. bk. 5, interr. 6.6, resp. ad 1, p. 107; trans. Kezel, p. 108).

³
For his continued influence into the early modern period, see Anne Schutte,
Aspiring Saints:
Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 44 ff.

⁴
I differ from Hohman in this respect. He notes that Gerson does invoke Henry in the context of the latter’s opposition to
the multiplication of saints (on this, see n. 21, below). But I think the parallels indicate direct influence. Gerson’s enlistment
of the Job citation, discussed below, seems particularly telling—especially if one considers that the evocation of Henry’s
name comes just after his use of the biblical citation (Gerson,
De probatione spirituum
c. 8, in
Oeuvres
, 9:181); see Thomas Hohman’s introduction,
Heinrichs von Langenstein
“
Unterscheidung der Geister
”
Lateinisch und Deutsch
(Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1977), p. 44.

⁵
Henry of Langenstein,
De discretione spirituum
c. 4, in
Heinrichs von Langenstein
, p. 80; cf. Gerson,
De probatione
c. 8, in
Oeuvres
, 9:181, trans. Paschal Boland,
The Concept of
“
Discretio
spirituum
”
in John Gerson
’
s
“
De probatione spirituum
”
and
“
De distinctione verarum visionum a
falsis
”
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1959), pp. 31–32; Gerson,
De examinatione
doctrinarum
c. 5, in
Oeuvres
, 9:471; idem,
De passionibus animae
c. 14, in
Oeuvres
, 9:13.

⁶
Frances Oakley, however, argues that d’Ailly’s
On False Prophets
is now understood to have been written between 1410 and 1414 rather than between 1372 and 1395 (“Gerson and d’Ailly: An Admonition,”
Speculum
40 [1965]: 74–75, 78–79). See n. 20, below.

⁷
This corresponds to Gerson’s other efforts toward female containment, particularly the promotion of the cult of Saint Joseph.
But the situation is hardly clear-cut. Gerson arguably played a pro-woman role through his writings that fostered his sisters’
spirituality and in the position he assumed in the controversy over
The Romance of the Rose
. See Dyan Elliott, “Seeing Double: Jean Gerson, the Discernment of Spirits, and Joan of Arc,”
American Historical Review
107 (2002): 31–32; Barbara Newman,
God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle
Ages
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 284–88.

⁸
See 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.: Syracuse University Press, 1993), pp. 24–27; AndréVauchez,
Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages
, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 408–9. For general background on Gerson, see James
Connolly,
Jean Gerson: Reformer and Mystic
(Louvain: Librairie Universitaire, 1928). Also see Pale è mon Glorieux, “La vie et les oeuvres de Gerson: essai chronologique,”
in
Archives d
’
histoire
doctrinale et litt
è
raire du Moyen Age
25–26 (1950–51): 149–92. Cf. Wendy Love’s discussion of Gerson in “Free Spirits, Presumptuous Women, and False Prophets: The
Discernment of Spirits in the Late Middle Ages” (Ph.D. diss., Divinity School, University of Chicago, 2002), pp. 239–99. Note
that Gerson’s mystical apprehension was not restricted to women, however. See his two letters against the Flemish mystic John
Ruusbroec (d. 1381), in
Oeuvres
, 2:55–62, 2:97–104; trans. Brian McGuire,
Jean Gerson: Early Works
(New York: Paulist Press, 1998), pp. 202–10, 249–55. For an exhaustive analysis, see AndréCombes,
Essai sur la critique de Ruysbroeck par Gerson
, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1945–48), particularly the discussion of demonic inspiration, which conveniently
mixes the true with the false (2:337–39). Gerson associates Ruusbroec’s error with the mystical heresy of the Free Spirit,
hence covertly implicating female mystical impulses (
Oeuvres
, 2:60; trans. McGuire, p. 208). See Robert Lerner’s “The Image of Mixed Liquid in Late Medieval Mystical Thought,”
Church History
40 (1971): 407–9.

⁹
See AndréVauchez’s “Les pouvoirs informels dans l’Eglise aux derniers sie`cles du Moyen Age: visionnaires, prophe`tes et
mystiques,”
MEFRM
96 (1984): 281–93; idem, “Sainte Brigitte de Sue`de et Sainte Catherine de Sienne: le mystique et l’Eglise aux derniers sie`cles
du Moyen Age,” in
Temi e problemi nella mistica femminile Trecento
, 14–17 ottobre Convegni del Centro di studi sulla spiritualita` medievale, Universita` degli studi di Perugia (Todi: Presso
l’accademia Tudertina, 1983), pp. 229–48; idem,
The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional
Practices
, trans. Margery Schneider (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. 219–36. Also see Wendy Love’s discussion
of prophecy during the schism, “Free Spirits, Presumptuous Women,” pp. 161–92.

¹⁰
See
Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense Concilium
, ed. Hermann von der Hardt (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Christianus Genschius, 1698), vol. 3, fols. 28–38. Henry of Langenstein’s
objections to Bridget’s canonization, which appear in his
Consilium pacis de unione ecclesiae
of 1381, are likewise included in the materials for Constance. His basic objection was that the calendar of saints was fast
becoming overpopulated (
Magnum . . . Constantiense
c. 18, vol. 2, fol. 56). On critics during Bridget’s lifetime and after her death, see Claire Sahlin,
Birgitta of Sweden and the
Voice of Prophecy
(Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2001), pp. 136–68. Eric Colledge’s now classic article focuses on Bridget’s posthumous critics
and her confessor’s defense (“
Epistola solitarii ad
reges
: Alphonse of Pecha as Organizer of Birgittine and Urbanist Propaganda,”
Mediaeval Studies
18 [1956]: 19–49). Bridget’s canonization, originally proclaimed in 1391, was nevertheless confirmed by the council (
Magnum . . . Constantiense
, vol. 4, fols. 39–40). For Gerson’s writings on discernment in the wider context of his views on church hierarchy and discipline,
see B. J. Caiger, “Doctrine and Discipline in the Church of Jean Gerson,”
Journal of Ecclesiastical History
41 (1990): 389–407.

¹¹
Gerson,
De distinctione verarum revelationum a falsis
, in
Oeuvres
, 3:42–43; trans. McGuire, pp. 343–44.