Table Of ContentMARVEL NOT:
DOUBTING RELIGIOUS VISIONARIES IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE
by
Andrew M. Fogleman
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)
May 2011
Copyright 2011 Andrew M. Fogleman
UMI Number: 3465991
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL USERS
The quality of this reproduction is dependent on the quality of the copy submitted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.
UMI 3465991
Copyright 2011 by ProQuest LLC.
All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.
ProQuest LLC.
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346
Dedication
To Stella Marie. You’re my star.
ii
Acknowledgements
Desiring with the poor woman to place something from our poverty and meagerness into
the guardhouse of the Lord's treasury, and to scale its heights, we have presumed to do a
work beyond our strength, placing our trust in its completion and recompense in the
Samaritan's labors, who, having given two denarii to care for the half-alive man,
promised to pay the innkeeper for his additional labors. The truth of the One promising
delights us, but the immensity of the work frightens: the desire of making progress
exhorts, but the infirmity of failing discourages, but this infirmity is conquered by zeal
for the house of God.
–Peter Lombard, Prologue to the Book of Sentences
I could have never completed this dissertation had it not been for the support of
friends, colleagues, and academic institutions. I’m indebted to the USC History
Department; the Medieval Association of the Pacific; the USC Center for Law, History,
and Culture; and the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute for grants and
fellowships that funded my writing and research. I am particularly thankful for a core
group of professors of medieval history who shaped my graduate experience at USC: my
advisor, Lisa Bitel, who has been a constant supporter and critical reader of my work
over the years; Paul Knoll, who has served as a mentor and guide through the sometimes
strange world of higher education; and Jason Glenn, whose graduate student seminars
pushed me to think deeply about my role as a historian and a person.
Others have helped more directly with the work of the dissertation itself. David
Albertson, Deborah Harkness, Kris Tanton, and Kristina Burhman read chapter drafts and
provided helpful comments. Ruth Robbins read individual chapters and a complete draft
of my dissertation, and aided me through the final stages of the project’s completion. My
iii
parents, Marv and Pat Fogleman, and parents-in-law, Marcelo and Emily Beleber,
provided sustaining prayers, moral support, and childcare. My children, Emily and
Blaise, provided inspiration to complete this project, and my wife, Stella, supplied the
steady encouragement necessary to see it through.
iv
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract vii
Introduction 1
Chapter One: Physicians and “le bien commun” of Paris 16
Scholastic Medical Theory 19
The Faculty of Medicine and the City of Paris 21
Diagnosing Danger: the Case of Jacqueline 25
Secular Interest nature and the body 35
Chapter Two: “The Antidote and Medicine of His Death and Passion”:
Medical Analogies in Nicole Oresme’s Sermon Collection 42
Oresme’s Sermon Collection for Sundays and Feast Days 44
Analogies in Sermon Literature 50
Analogies of the Body and Medicine 59
Physicians and Remedies 65
Analogies of the Functions of the Body 73
Analogies of Diseases 78
Chapter Three: “Live in joy and Happiness because [these] cool down
the body”: Perceptual Error and the Problems with Personal Experience 94
Errors from Outside the Body 100
Sight and Media 100
Errors from Inside the Body 106
The Brain and the Internal Senses 106
The Faculty of the Imagination 113
Chapter Four: “Be suspicious at all times of any unusual visions”:
Nicole Oresme, Religious Visionaries, and Perceptual Errors 145
From Occult Practitioners to Religious Visionaries 149
A Theology of Balance and Restraint 193
Conclusion 203
Bibliography 207
v
Appendices
Appendix I: Sermon 1 of Nicole Oresme’s Sermon Collection
1st Sunday in Advent 222
Appendix II: Overview of Authorities 243
Appendix III: Non-Biblical Authorities 251
vi
Abstract
Long before today’s sometimes rancorous debates about faith and science, European
theologians struggled to reconcile the two. During the later Middle Ages, religious
thinkers increasingly drew on naturalistic explanations of the world to explain
supernatural phenomena. Nichole Oresme (1320 – 1382), philosopher and theologian at
the University of Paris, councilor to King Charles V of France, and bishop of Lisieux,
wrote a series of treatises warning that natural or medical causes caused false religious
visions. His investigations, and those of his students and followers, explicitly challenged
older assumptions about the relation between asceticism, holiness, and visionary
experience so familiar to medieval Christians. Oresme’s influence did not lead to a
suppression of visionary practice but instead transformed late medieval and early modern
religious visionary experiences and explanations for them. Preachers no longer blamed
demons for all religious delusions, but instead bad diet and poor health. By assimilating
medical ideas about human illness and perceptual error, theologians created a new mode
of Christian pious conduct, encouraging greater emotional restraint and purposeful
physiological balance to guard against false visions. Along the way, they shaped
developing debates about what is lost and what is gained when religious communities
modernize their beliefs and practices.
vii
Introduction
“In order to set people’s minds at rest to some extent,” wrote Nicole Oresme
(1321-1382) in the introduction to his Questions (Quodlibeta), a work devoted to
explaining marvelous and potentially miraculous phenomena, “I propose here… to show
the causes of some effects, which seem to be marvels, and to show that the[se] effects
occur naturally, as do the others at which we commonly do not marvel.” Continuing on,
Oresme stated the goal of this treatise in the form of a conclusion: “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.”1 From his earliest writings as a master of arts at
the University of Paris to well into his ecclesiastical career as a bishop, Oresme promoted
naturalistic reasoning as the best method for explaining marvelous occurrences, such as
prodigies and the magical or spiritual powers that occult practitioners and other religions
seemed to possess.
Oresme’s desire to set people’s minds at rest is understandable given the many
causes of anxiety over the course of the fourteenth century, especially for Parisians like
himself. During the collection of years associated with Oresme’s birth (c.1320), France
suffered along with the rest of Europe through the ravages of the Great Famine (1317-
1322), during which time 10-15% of the entire population of Europe starved to death.
The agricultural production of Oresme’s home region, Normandy, withered under
1 Nicole Oresme, De causis mirabilium, In Bert Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature: The De
causis mirabilium (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985), 137.
1
devastating windstorms and frost.2 Some twenty years later, in 1339, Edward III, King of
England, invaded Normandy in an attempt to make good on his claim to the French
throne. Edward and his men sacked the city of Caen, Oresme’s hometown, and pillaged
the surrounding regions, shipping nobles and soldiers back to England for ransom in the
beginning of the cluster of conflicts that made up the Hundred Years War. A decade later,
while Oresme was studying theology in the College of Navarre at the University of Paris,
the Black Death ravaged the city of Paris and the French countryside on two separate
occasions, killing almost half the population.3 In 1356, the same year that Oresme
became Grand Master of the College of Navarre, Parisians learned of the complete defeat
of the French forces at the battle of Poitiers by the English and the capture of their King,
John II. During John’s captivity in England, Parisians faced domestic trouble as well.
Étienne Marcel led a violent revolution and took control of the city of Paris 1358. At the
same time, in a rebellion known as the Jacquerie, peasants killed nobles and destroyed
property throughout France. These events were alarming, and they primed the curiosities
of royal leaders and nobles with the monetary resources and leisure to seek out those who
could explain the causes of France’s bad luck. There was no shortage of people willing to
provide answers to these questions and advice for the future: Astrologers offered their
services to kings and the papacy alike, friars, such as John of Rupescissa, laid out
complex end-of-days scenarios calling for religious reform; religious flagellants linked
the plague and war to moral failings of kings and church leaders; and religious
2 William C. Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 19 and 120.
3 Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death 1346-1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge, Boydell Press,
2004), 108-09.
2
