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Abstract
During the later Middle Ages, European theologians increasingly drew on naturalistic explanations of the world to explain supernatural phenomena. Three theologians at the University of Paris, Nicole Oresme (ca. 1323–1382), Henry Langenstein (1325–1397), and Jean Gerson (1363–1429) wrote a series of treatises on religious visionaries warning that natural or medical causes were often behind the claims of Christian and non‐Christian religious visionaries. This article traces how this naturalistic analysis of visionary claims became popularized in Christian visionary treatises and considers its effect upon Christian practice as a whole. In particular, I argue that medieval naturalism developed into an explicit challenge to older, ascetic‐based ideals of holiness commonly associated with the lives of Christian visionaries.
Notes
1. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, ed. Frances Horgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 283.
2. Jean is referred to as a maîstre in certain manuscripts. See Patricia E. Black, “Roman de la Rose: Jean de Meun (1235/1240–circa 1305),” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 208 of Literature of the French and Occitan Middle Ages: Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Deborah M. Sinnreich‐Levi and Ian S. Laurie (Detroit: Gale Group, 1999), 321–37.
3. The condemnations (of 1277) especially focused upon theories or descriptions of the world that were deemed too naturalistic by the bishop and his colleagues. See Edward Grant, A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 202; and J. M. M. H. Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 50–52.
4. David Pich, La Condamnation Parisienne de 1277 (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1999), 88: “Quod raptus et visions non fiunt, nisi per naturam.”
5. For a tour of twelfth‐century naturalism, see William J. Courtenay, “Nature and the Natural in Twelfth‐Century Thought,” in Covenant and Causality in Medieval Thought (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984); and Andreas Speer, “The Discovery of Nature: The Contribution of the Chartrians to Twelfth‐Century Attempts to Found a Scientia Naturalis,” Traditio 52 (1997): 135–51.
6. Courtenay, “Nature and the Natural in Twelfth‐Century Thought,” 9–10; and Bert Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature: A Study of His De causis mirabilium (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985), 50–56.
7. For the importance of twelfth‐century natural philosophy in laying the foundation for interest in Aristotle and his commentators, see Speer, “The Discovery of Nature,” 151. Joseph Ziegler traces the introduction of medical explanations of the miraculous in commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences from the twelfth century onward in “Medicine and Immortality in Terrestrial Paradise,” in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2001), 201–42.
8. Aristotle's “natural books” were banned at the University of Paris in 1210 and again in 1215, although by 1255 the condemned books had already become a part of the curriculum. See Edward Grant, “What was Natural Philosophy in the late Middle Ages?” History of Universities 20 (2005): 18; and Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 42.
9. Joseph Ziegler, “Practitioners and Saints: Medical Men in Canonization Processes in the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries,” The Society for the Social History of Medicine 12, no. 2 (1999): 208.
10. For natural philosophy, see Ptolemy's Almagest; Aristotle's Physics, De caelo, De generatione et corruptione, Metaphysics, De anima, Parva naturalia; The Pseudo‐Aristotelian Liber de causis; Averroës' series of “long commentaries” of Aristotle's Posterior analytics, Physics, De caelo, De anima, and Metaphysics; and Avicenna's The Book of Healing, and the Canon of Medicine.
11. Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature, 10, 61–70; Gordon Leff, “The Trivium and the Three Philosophies,” in A History of the University in Europe, ed. Hilde De Ridder‐Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 319; and Grant, A History of Natural Philosophy, 130–55. For the influence of medicine on natural philosophy from the twelfth century on, see Danielle Jacquart, “Medical Scholasticism,” in Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Mirko D. Grmek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 238–40. For critiques of “folk” medicine as exemplifying ignorance of cause and effect relationships with the body, see Joseph Ziegler, “Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages,” in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Biller and Ziegler, 6–7, especially n. 11 for text.
12. Consider the following thirteenth‐century quotation from Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiæ (Ia IIae, q. 32, a. 8) cited in Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature, 67: “For to marvel is to be ignorant of nature. … Marveling is a certain desire for knowing, which arises in a person from the fact that he sees an effect and is ignorant of its cause, or from the fact that such an effect exceeds his cognition or faculty.” On cause and effect in general, see Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature, 61–69.
13. See G. W. Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers: A Study of his “Livre de Divinacions” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 6–7; Richard Lemay, “The Teaching of Astronomy in Medieval Universities, Principally at Paris in the Fourteenth Century,” Manuscripta 20 (1976): 202–4; S. J. Tester, A History of Western Astrology (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 1987), 196–201; and Laura Ackerman Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d'Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 32–36.
14. For a general introduction to Nicole Oresme and his works, see Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature, 1–16. For specific works with helpful introductions, see Nicole Oresme, De proportionibus proportionum and Ad pauca respicientes, ed. Edward Grant (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966); Marshall Clagett, Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities and Motions (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968); Edward Grant, Nicole Oresme and the Kinematics of Circular Motion (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971).
15. For a full account of Oresme's attitude toward marvels, see Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature, 49–70; for astrology, see Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers, 2–25.
16. Nicole Oresme, Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, in Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities and Motions. A Treatise on the Uniformity and Difformity of intensities known as Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), II. xxix (28–33), 346.
17. On Oresme's doctrine of configurations, see Clagett, Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities and Motions, 14–50.
18. Oresme, Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, ed. Clagett, I.xxv (20–35), 236–39.
19. For the text and a series of challenges to this date, see Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature, 43–48.
20. Oresme's thesis is made explicit in the prologue: “In order to set people's minds at rest to some extent, I propose here, … to show the causes of some effects which seem to be marvels and to show that the effects occur naturally, as do the others at which we commonly do not marvel. There is no reason to take recourse to the heavens, the last refuge of the weak, or demons, or to our glorious God as if He would produce these effects directly, more so than those effects whose causes we believe are well known to us.” (Oresme, De causis mirabilium, in Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature: A Study of His De causis mirabilium, ed. Bert Hansen [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985], [Prologue, 1–8], 136–37.)
21. For example, Oresme's De causis mirabilium draws upon Aristotle's De anima (Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature, 297), De memoria, and De somno (ibid., 293) and Oresme attributes parts of his work to Averroës (ibid., 287) and Avicenna's Liber de naima seu Sextus de naturalibus (ibid., 345).
22. Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature, 52.
23. The medieval understanding of the movements of spirits within the body should not be confused with Christian notions of a soul or “movement” of the Holy Spirit. Classical notions of bodily spirits, or pneuma, first introduced by Hippocrates, then developed further by Aristotle and Galen, were considered air‐like substances which aided in bodily communications between its three major systems: the brain and nerves, the heart and arteries, and the liver and veins.
24. Oresme, De causis mirabilium, ed. Hansen (1.227–41), 162–65; and Oresme, De causis mirabilium (1.227–35), 162–65. See full quotation below. Hansen translates pro modico and pro non modico as “readily” and “not readily,” see Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature, 165.
25. Oresme, De causis mirabilium, ed. Hansen (1.190–200), 160–63: “People marvel at such things only because they rarely happen; but the causes for these are as apparent as for others, as has been said. For example, at night a fearful man who sees a wolf in the fields, or a cat in his room, will immediately assert and judge that it is an enemy or a devil or etc. because he fixes his imagination on these and fears them. And a person devout and rapt [in ecstasy] will judge that it is an angel or etc. A vigorous imagining of a retained species, then, together with a small external appearance or with an imbalance of some internal disposition (as stated in the fourth notabile), produces marvelous appearances in healthy as well as in sick people; …” Cf. Oresme, De causis mirabilium ed. Hansen (1.235–37), 164–65: “Readily: as in the case where Sortes riding along the road is by chance startled at the flight of a lark perhaps, or recalls what he heard said about that place, namely that in such a place souls or spirits are wont to appear, and then begins to think excitedly about such things; and in this way a small movement is enough to stupefy him and [for something] to appear to him etc.”
26. Oresme, De causis mirabilium, ed. Hansen (1.190–200), 160–63.
27. Oresme, De causis mirabilium, ed. Hansen (1.195–98), 160–63.
28. Oresme, De causis mirabilium, ed. Hansen (1.115–20), 154–57: “It happens in sleep, why can it not happen also when he is awake? … I say, as I have said before, that it is possible that on account of strong imagining he does not attend to the things before him, wherefore etc. And so, we see from the evidence of our senses that any person when he withdraws himself can somehow make it appear to him that in his mind he sees Peter or a fortress or something.”
29. Oresme, De causis mirabilium, ed. Hansen (1.227–35), 162–65: “From the notabilia presented above can be concluded the reasons why those who see such things and those to whom such visions appear are deceived. … And, as I have said, this is caused by a vigorous movement of bad humours which sometimes begins readily and sometimes not, etc.” Also see Oresme, Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, ed. Clagett, II.xxix (1–14), 344–47: “That such things often take place without demons is further demonstrated. For it is certain on the basis of innumerable experiences and the [statements of] medical authors and other histories that a similar thing often happens as the result of several accidents and from numerous causes in many diseases and types of mania, namely that sick people think that they see and hear demons and many other fantastic things which have no external counterpart. But all these things arise from the defect of the interior sense organs and the corruption of the interior apprehending, imaginative, or estimative power brought about by an abscess of the brain or some other cause. … Whence it is certain that these things do not arise from a demon but in a natural way.”
30. Oresme, Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, ed. Clagett, II.xxx (37–44), 352–53: “For in certain of their books a fasting or spiritual diet and a solitary life and similar practices are prescribed as certain preparatory conditions for men whose minds cannot be changed so easily; because by abstinence and deprivations and such things the natural constitution is altered, the mind is changed and drawn away from prior, ordinary thoughts, thus being disposed and prepared for easy belief in things of this sort.”
31. Oresme, De causis mirabilium, ed. Hansen (1.198–200), 162–63: “… and the more that the imbalances of the said depositions concur, the more error there is in judging, …”
32. Oresme, De causis mirabilium, ed. Hansen (1.200), 162–63.
33. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1987), 115–40; Rosalynn Voaden, God's Words, Women's Voices (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 1999), 34–40.
34. See R. N. Swanson, Universities, Academics and the Great Schism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 41–44.
35. Nicholas H. Steneck, Science and Creation in the Middle Ages: Henry of Langenstein (d. 1397) on Genesis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), 13, 16.
36. Both treatises are edited in Hubert Pruckner, Studien zu den astrologischen Schriften des Heinrich von Langenstein, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg 14 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1933).
37. Steneck, Science and Creation in the Middle Ages, 16, 128–30; Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars, 35–36. For similar borrowings, see Stefano Caroti, “Nicole Oresme's Polemic against Astrology in his Quodlibeta,” in Astrology, Science and Society: Historical Essays, ed. Patrick Curry (Wolfeboro, NH: Boydell Press, 1987), 92–93.
38. Steneck, Science and Creation in the Middle Ages, 127–30.
39. Henry Langenstein, De discretione spirituum, in Heinrichs von Langenstein “Unterscheindung der Geister” lateinisch und deutsch: Texte und Untersuchungen zu Űbersetzungsliteratur aus der Wiener Schule, ed. Thomas Hohmann (Zürich und München: Artemis Verlag, 1977) (3.30), 62: “Therefore that you might understand, which spirit is sent from God, you ought to know, what the principal origins of the forces and apparitions (aspirationum), which are accustomed to press against our mind. There are three: namely the condition of nature, and good and bad spirits.” Cf. Augustine's Literal Commentary on Genesis, Bk. 12.
40. Henry Langenstein, De discretione spirituum, ed. Hohmann (3.30), 62; For Langenstein's naturalizing tendencies, see Dyan Elliott, Proving Women: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 259–60.
41. Langenstein, De discretione spirituum, ed. Hohmann (3.101–115), 68: “… they are driven by a spirit of austerity which induces them toward excessive abstinence, vigils, labors, contemplations and prayers. Such men, at various times exceed the appropriate standard of the human condition by indiscriminant and empty custom, God permits to be led by delusions or errors of habitual action and naïve belief.” Cf. ibid. 4.41–49.
42. Langenstein, De discretione spirituum, ed. Hohmann (3.110, 11), 68: “For to act as a foolish, irrational, and indiscrete man is exceeding hateful to God, as this is to greatly resist the human condition, to which God gave rationality and sufficiently instructed him with divine and human understanding.”
43. Langenstein, De discretione spirituum, ed. Hohmann (2.25–30), 58: “Likewise, fourth, [visions may come] from a great number and variety of phantasms or species of images collected over a long period of time in anyone of abiding melancholy and an unsettled memory. Many times [they arise] unexpectedly and exceedingly quickly, after the violent movement of one's imagination on account of an extended period of thinking or seeking after of something in a worried manner. Many marvels arise and occur with imperceptible swiftness, as if sent out by some spirit.”
44. Langenstein, De discretione spirituum, ed. Hohmann (4.9–10), 70: “But some [ascetics] believe the judgment of sensible people and follow the advice of doctors [and] thus are brought back to reason. Others, however, do not. Yet it seems to common people, that these very ones are [considered] the most holy, and that all the others receive corrupted advice concerning themselves and other matters; and that they alone judge themselves the best, not those observing. Although in many cases a man is a bad judge of himself and rather ought to stand in the judgment of others than himself.”
45. Langenstein, De discretione spirituum, ed. Hohmann (4.45–50), 72: “Et quandoque deus in ira sua sinit eis phantasticas visiones immitti undecumque et eos deliros fieri et fatuos, qui indebite cupierunt esse vates.”
46. Langenstein, De discretione spirituum, ed. Hohmann (4.19–23), 70: “But because many people laboring with the aforesaid illness rely upon such discretion of their own, completely unwilling to follow the advice of good and discerning men or on account of not having [such advice], remain incurable and labor in vain after vain things until they finally go completely insane.”
47. The literature on Gerson is vast and growing. For general introductions, see D. Catherine Brown, Pastor and Laity in the Theology of Jean Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Daniel Hobbins, “The Schoolman as Public Intellectual: Jean Gerson and the Late Medieval Tract,” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 1308–37; Brian Patrick McGuire, Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005) and A Companion to Jean Gerson, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Leiden: Brill, 2006). For Gerson on spiritual discernment, see André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein, trans. Margery J. Schneider (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993); 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, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993); Brian Patrick McGuire, “Late Medieval Care and Control of Women: Jean Gerson and his Sisters,” Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique 92 (1997): 5–37; Rosalynn Voaden, God's Words, Women's Voices (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 1999); Dyan Elliott, “Seeing Double: John Gerson, the Discernment of Spirits, and Joan of Arc,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 26–54; Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Joan of Arc and Spirituality (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Dyan Elliott, Proving Women: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Wendy Love Anderson “Gerson's Stance on Women,” in A Companion to Jean Gerson, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 317–57.
48. Edward Grant, “Nicole Oresme,” in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 475.
49. On Oresme's influence on Gerson, see Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature, 114–19. Also for astrology, see Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers, 39, 41.
50. The following quotation is found in Gerson's sermon on the festival of All Saints: “But whoever would test and interrogate such a one [sorcerer] well and wisely [would see] that it does not happen even once out of a hundred times [as they predict]. … And on this matter many doctors have written: St. Augustine in the book De diviatione demonum and De trinitate 7.19; William [of Auvergne], formerly bishop of Paris, in the book De universo and in De fide et ligibus; master Nicole Oresme in his Quodlibeta and in the De configuratione qualitatum; and many others.” Gerson, “En la fête de la Toussaint,” Œuvres completes, ed. Palémon Glorieux, vol. 7, pt. 2 (Paris: Desclée & Cie, 1961), 1001; cited in Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature, 115.
51. Swanson, Universities, Academics and the Great Schism, 59–64.
52. Steneck, Science and Creation in the Middle Ages, 18–19. Some have assumed a direct link because of the similarities of the naturalistic criticisms. See Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 295; Elliott, Proving Woman, 266.
53. Lynn Thorndike recognizes Gerson as more of Henry Langenstein's pupil than Pierre d'Ailly. See Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 4 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 116.
54. Although this text is commonly discussed as a tract against the canonization of Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373), André Combes has argued that it is rather directed against other candidates for sainthood by the Swedish delegations after Bridget's canonization was completed. See André Combes, Essai sur la critique de Ruysbroeck par Gerson (Paris: J. Vrin, 1945–72), i. 297–329.
55. Jean Gerson, On Distinguishing True from False Revelations, trans. Brian Patrick McGuire, (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 339; Jean Gerson, “De distinctione revelationum,” vol. 3 in Jean Gerson: Œuvres Complètes, ed. Palémon Glorieux (Paris: Desclée & Cie, 1960), 40. From here forward as GL.
56. Gerson, Distinguishing True from False Revelations, trans. McGuire, 339. De distinctione revelationum, GL, 3.40: “Et si quae talia praeter solitum evenire circa eum contigerit, rejiciat a se cum sancto, humili verecundoque pudore. Deputet talia vel laesioni propriae phantasiae, et se habere aliquid simile phreneticis, et maniacis aut melancholicis reformidet; vel timeat ne propter enormitatem praecedentium peccatrorum datus sit in reprobum sensum ut talibus illusionibus seducatur.” Cf. De distinctione revelationum, GL, 3.44.
57. Gerson, Distinguishing True from False Revelations, trans. McGuire, 346. De distinctione revelationum, GL, 3.44: Invalescit autem haec passio usque ad hanc aliquando insaniam ut judicet se homo aliud esse quam est; quemadmodum repertus est qui se murilegum, alius qui se gallum, alius qui se asinum, alius qui se mortuum reputaret. … Pleni sunt medicorum libri de portentuosis hujusmodi apparitionibus et judiciorum corruptionibus ex laesione virium interiorum nascentibus.”
58. Jerome, “To Rusticus” in Nicene and Post‐Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 6 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999), 249: “some too there are who from the dampness of their cells and from the severity of their fasts, from their weariness of solitude and from excessive study have a singing in their ears day and night and turn melancholy mad so as to need poultices of Hippocrates more than exhortations from me.”
59. Paschal Boland, The Concept of discretion spirituum in John Gerson's “De probatione spirituum” and “De distinctione verarum visionum a falsis” (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1959), 37.
60. Gerson, Distinguishing True from False Revelations, trans. McGuire, 346. De distinctione revelationum, GL, 3.44: “Unde fuerunt nonnulli doctorum qui hac aegritudine percussum arbitrati sunt fuisse ipsum Nabuchodonosor, ut brutum animal se esse crederet et non veraciter induerit corpus belluinum.” Cf. Daniel 4:1–34.
61. Gerson, Distinguishing True from False Revelations, trans. McGuire, 346. De distinctione revelationum, GL, 3.45: “Sed nonne Joannes Baptista a Deo miraculose productus est? Semen igitur materiale ex quo corpus compaginandum erat, nec durum nimis nec rursus fluidum abundantius fuit, sed tale prorsus fuit quale disponere et ministrare talem et tantum decebat artificem Deum.”
62. Luke 1:5–23.
63. Gerson, Distinguishing True from False Revelations, trans. McGuire, 345–46. De distinctione revelationum, GL, 3.44: “Itaque ad par exitium vergunt abstinentia nimia et crapulosa voracitas; nisi quod irremediabilior est excessus in abstinentia; quia morbos affert incurabiles ex laesione cerebri et rationis perturbatione, quo fit ut per maniam aut furiam vel caeteras passiones melancolicas sic profundantur et intime radicantur phantasmata interius reservata in cerebro, quod esse reputantur verae res extrinsecus apparentes, et audire se putat homo, videre vel tangere quod nullo modo sensu exteriori percipitur.”
64. Gerson, Distinguishing True from False Revelations, trans. McGuire, 343–44. De distinctione revelationum, GL, 3.43.
65. Gerson, Distinguishing True from False Revelations, trans. McGuire, 344. De distinctione revelationum, GL, 3.43: “Expavi fateor et exhorrui; dissimulans tamen coepi osterndere daemonis hos esse laqueos, et eam periculo insaniae vicinam esse, …”
66. Gerson, Distinguishing True from False Revelations, trans. McGuire, 344. De distinctione revelationum, GL, 3.43: “Tandem monui eam bona fide et sub attestatione maximi discriminis sui in anima et corpore, ut fatuam desereret hanc jejunandi obstinationem, …”
67. See quotation above.
68. Nicole Oresme, “Livre des Divinacions,” in Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers, ed. Coopland, 92–93: “Toutes voies ne vueil je pas dire que on ne puisse bien savoir aucunes choses absentes ou advenir par prophecie, ou revelacion divine, ou par raison, et sans telles sciences, sicomme j'ay declaire ou Livre de la Figuracion de Qualitez, mais telles visions ont personnes de sobre vie et paisible desquelles l'ame est aussi comme un vray mirouer cler et respendissant, asprete de cogitacions mondainnes.”
69. Oresme, Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, ed. Clagett, I.xxxiii (6–12), 252, 253.
70. Oresme, Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, ed. Clagett, I.xxxiii (6–16), 252–53: “Therefore, just as not all bodies are naturally suitable to be mirrors and reflect rays in an ordered way (in fact, in addition to certain other circumstances it is chiefly required that they be polished and clean), so a soul that is unpolished and rough with the difformity of thoughts is not disposed to be a mirror in which the future or other hidden things discernible by visions shine forth.”
71. Oresme, Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, ed. Clagett, I.xxxiii (11–23), 252–55: “But the soul, which, with passions extinct and the variety of thoughts set aside, has been made by abstraction as it were uniform or even difform with a polished or ordered difformity, is suitable for this [visionary foresight], and in it as in a certain mirror many things which are hidden to other souls can shine forth. The sign of this is that those who are accustomed to have such visions are for the most part assuaged of passions and far removed from the tumult of thoughts. Accordingly, when the Prophet Isaias wished to show what the future would be upon the fulfillment of the statement of another prophet who said to the people of Israel, “your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions,” he [Isaias] said directly, “the crooked shall become straight and the rough ways plane, and the glory of the Lord will by revealed.” [This is] as if he were to say that then the souls of certain ones will be drawn away from the roughness of crooked thoughts into the evenness of uniformity; and accordingly in them, as if in certain mirrors, the glory of God will be revealed in vision.”
72. Oresme, Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, ed. Clagett, Ixxxiii (20–23), 254. Cf. Isaiah 40:4–5; Oresme also cites the following scriptures for analogies of spiritual and bodily balance: Job 17:17, and Matthew 13:7, 22–23.
73. Oresme, Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, ed. Clagett, Ixxxiii (20–23), 254–55: “[This is] as if he were to say that then the souls of certain ones will be drawn away from the roughness of crooked thoughts into the evenness of uniformity; and according in them, as if in certain mirrors, the glory of God will be revealed in vision.”
74. Langenstein, De discretione spirituum, ed. Hohmann (3.122–23), 68: “Inter ista duo extrema mala, tamquam inter duos numeros cubicos sunt duo media. Videlicet illi, qui perfecte spiritualiter noverunt vivere, non excedentes indiscrete mensuram et conditionem hominis et virium eius in exercitiis spiritualibus.” The reference to “two middles,” duo media, likely refers to an academic mathematical concept that would have been familiar to his readers.
75. Langenstein, De discretione spirituum, ed. Hohmann (3.131–35), 68. Cf. (3.110–11), 68.
76. Consider the structure of the two following quotations found in two separate visionary treatises (italics mine): “If someone comes who claims to have had a revelation of that type that Zechariah and other prophets in sacred history are known to have received, what are we to do, and how are we to act? If we immediately deny everything …, we will seem to weaken the authority of divine revelation, … We will scandalize, moreover, ordinary people if we say that our revelations and prophecies can be falsehoods and that they are but fantasies and illusions. We are obliged to find a middle way.” Jean Gerson, On Distinguishing True from False Revelations, ed. McGuire, 337; De distinctione revelationum. GL. 3.38. And “Truly there is danger here, either in approving or in disapproving of such [visionary] writings. For what would be more disgraceful or incongruous for this Sacred Council than to declare that false, imaginary, or foolish visions are true and genuine revelation? On the other hand to denounce those revelations which are declared authentic … would pose a threat, perhaps great, of spiritual harm to the Christian religion and the devotion of the faithful. Finally, I fear that some judgment is expressed even by silence, or by reticence, by which the matter is held in abeyance. Certainly to try to discover some middle way between these two extremes is well worthwhile, and I do not think that such a course has been sufficiently investigated.” Boland, The Concept of discretio spirituum in John Gerson's “De probatione spirituum” and “De distinctione verarum visionum a falsis,” 28, 29; GL, 179.
77. Gerson, “Letter of Gerson to Jean Morel,” in Jean Gerson: Early Works, ed. McGuire, 245: “Although it is not necessary for salvation to believe that each individual event happened as a fact and in the way it is told in the book, I think, nevertheless, that it is rash and crude to insist on dissenting from such things or to attack them with stubborn ill will. The rationale of the first point is that very many such events are concerned with matters that are irrelevant for the faith; many occurrences are asserted to be miracles that can be naturally explained, even through similar events can take place miraculously. Still, not everything, as is asserted, can be excluded from the category of miracle.” GL. 2.25, 94.
78. Gerson, “Letter of Gerson to Jean Morel,” trans. McGuire, 246: “Add to this that the hand of God should not be shortened (Is 59:1), for it formerly could do similar and greater things than in our times. Nor does it have to follow that if many such events can take place [i.e., naturally], that these can be denied to be miracles. For as the same death takes place for different reasons, so the same effect can happen in divers ways. When something unclear happens in connection with a miracle, it seems that divine omnipotence is more honored, as well as Christian religion, in attributing to a miracle that which happened, rather than in stubbornly denying the miraculous.” GL. 2.25, 94.
79. Danielle Jacquart, “Medical Practice in Paris in the First Half of the Fourteenth Century,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. Luis García‐Ballester et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 199–201; Cornelius O'Boyle, “Surgical Texts and Social Contexts: Physicians and Surgeons in Paris, ca. 1270 to 1430,” in Practical Medicine, ed. García‐Ballester et al., 172–75.