As a theologian and former chancellor of Paris University, Jean Gerson played a prominent part in resolving the Great Schism through the Council of Constance in 1415–18. He was also a loyal supporter of the French monarchy; shortly before his death he published a characteristically scholastic defence of Joan of Arc. In secular as in ecclesiastical politics, he pursued a middle course, ‘the well-trod path’ (p. 37) as he described it, remote from error and scandal. But, as he lived in times of vicious turbulence in Church and State, his consistency drove him into exile. Like St Anselm three centuries earlier, Gerson was sustained by a group of monastic admirers who ensured that his works were preserved for posterity. His writings (mainly in Latin but some in French) comprise eleven volumes in the modern edition. Daniel Hobbins, who has already published a series of articles on Gerson, argues that he became increasingly conscious of himself as an author – rather than a scholastic – with a distinctive message for his fellow Catholics.

The first of half of this book analyses his role as an author (in the sense both of ‘originator’ and ‘authority’) with chapters entitled ‘Gerson as bookman’, ‘Justifying authorship’, ‘A tour of medieval authorship’ and ‘Literary expression’. In exile after 1418, Gerson built up contacts with monks centred on Lyon and the Grande Chartreuse. Hobbins provides a map showing the diffusion of Gerson manuscripts in Carthusian and Celestine houses in France, the Rhineland, the Danube area and the Baltic coast. Such ‘fantastic success’ (Hobbins's hyperbole, p. 183) explains the title of his concluding chapter: ‘Publishing before print: from coterie readership to massive market’. Certainly Carthusian and Celestine monks were more than a coterie, as they reached out in the fifteenth century to readers beyond their walls. They overcame their vow of silence by dedicating themselves to copying manuscripts. In their hands a Gerson text might be lent out or explained to a monastery's patrons and devotees. ‘Textual communities’ (in Brian Stock's formulation) linked readers and non-readers. Hobbins estimates that for each text of Gerson's now surviving in fifty manuscripts, there were once up to a thousand copies. I would add that if each copy signified a ‘textual community’ of ten persons, we reach an audience of up to 10,000 devotees for the most successful of Gerson's works.

Through such networks, monks and schoolmen had created an international market for books long before the invention of printing. As William of St Thierry complained of Peter Abelard in 1140, his books crossed the seas and passed over the Alps. Similarly Gerson's defence of Joan of Arc was being copied out in Rome, Paris and Bruges within months of her victory at Orléans in 1429. Such works travelled initially in the form of unbound booklets or rolled parchment folios; Gerson describes the cheap and unadorned tractatuli (‘little tracts’) which parish clergy possessed. During the Investiture Controversy, as in the crisis of the papacy in Gerson's time three centuries later, schoolmen conducted their war of words through ‘controversial booklets’ (libelli de lite). The Council of Constance was an international bookfair and multi-focused academic conference as well as a gathering of the universal Church. There Gerson's tractatulus ‘On ecclesiastical power’ was read out loud. Hobbins comments that publishing by reading aloud (pronunciato) ‘is very poorly understood’ (p. 274). Perhaps there need be no great mystery about it, however, as the practice still persists among academics.

Hobbins's analysis suggests that little has changed in academic publishing over the centuries, though this is not the message that he wishes to convey. Finding the right market for an author has always been a greater problem for publishers than supplying enough copies of the book. A short run of a thousand copies is still viable today, if the marketing is done through academic networks like learned societies. Our digital innovation of ‘print on demand’ was provided for in the Middle Ages both by subsidising monks and clerics as scribes and by commercial scriptoria making bespoke books. Hobbins concludes that the publishing system of Gerson's time was ‘closer in some ways to print than to the manuscript production of the twelfth century’ (p. 217). But he tells us nothing about book production in the twelfth century. He claims that Gerson's publishing through tractatuli was novel: ‘we should recognize the great historical shift that was occurring here, symbolized by the shift to the tract’ (p. 151). In fact the tract or booklet had always been the basic unit of manuscript production; binding booklets between boards produced the codex.

Hobbins identifies Gerson as ‘a new type, the medieval public intellectual, concerned far more than his predecessors with the world beyond the schools and more involved in public outreach’ (p. 217). Over the centuries distinguished schoolmen had often been involved in public outreach and the politics of the day: obvious examples are Manegold of Lautenbach, William of Champeaux, Peter the Chanter, Stephen Langton, Albertus Magnus and Marsilius of Padua. In Gerson's own time the most conspicuous – and notorious – schoolmen reaching out to a wider public were Wyclif and Hus. Following ‘the well-trod path’, Gerson participated in their condemnation at the Council of Constance. By contrast with heretics, he established his worth as an author by exemplifying legitimate ecclesiastical authority. This is why his writings have colophons explaining why and when they were written. Hobbins has rightly used this kind of detail to examine Gerson's place in the history of publication and authorship. But, because Hobbins does not reach back into medieval manuscript culture as a whole, he cannot distinguish the novel from the familiar. Gerson was a moralist and controversialist in a long scholastic tradition; he would have earnestly hoped that neither his methods nor his achievements would be considered novel.