The Fifteenth-Century Councils and Distribution Patterns of the Works of Jean Gerson

Historians have long stressed the centrality of Jean Gerson to the development of late medieval thought. Etienne Delaruelle even described the fifteenth century as the “siècle de Gerson,” and recent studies have traced his influence in fields such as art and music. But historians have barely begun to sift through the vast material evidence for Gerson’s impact, specifically the thousands of surviving manuscripts of his works. Simply put, this was one of the greatest manuscript distributions of the middle ages, yet we have only a poor understanding of its contours. In my recent book on Gerson (2009), I proposed a model for understanding how a “massive market” of his works developed across Europe within just a few years of his death. Gerson benefited from three major “distribution circles”: the Council of Constance, the Charterhouse network, and the Council of Basel. In this paper I will examine the spread of two different constellations of works, three works on discretion of spirits and four works on magic and “superstition.” The study will reveal the geographical limits to the distribution of Gerson’s works. Those that reached Constance and Basel usually spread deeply and evenly into central Europe and survive in many copies, more in German-speaking regions than in France. At Basel, we can detect a kind of industrial production of Gerson’s works that anticipated the role of print itself in the diffusion of European literature. Those works that did not reach the councils spread east from France much more slowly. The works on magic and superstition reached the Rhine basin and possibly Bavaria, and only became generally known with the publication of the first opera omnia.