Discernment of Spirits and Spiritual Authority: the Tractatus De Vita Spirituali and Its Afterlife

Chapter 3 Discernment of Spirits and Spiritual Authority: The Tractatus de vita spirituali and Its Afterlife

Rosa Vidal Doval

The question of the authenticity and origin of visions and prophecies— discernment of spirits—gained fresh urgency in the later Middle Ages. The development of new forms of affective spirituality coupled with the profound spiritual crisis triggered by the Great Schism (1378–1417) brought visionaries and mystics both prestige and suspicion. Those mystics who sought to resolve the Schism found themselves under intense clerical scrutiny; at the same time, the Church viewed the manifestations of affective spirituality with increasing caution and suspicion.1 These developments have long been studied through the lens of gender—almost exclusively female. Scholars have stressed how the works of Jean Gerson (d. 1429) developed a process of “institutionally-grounded examination”—the Gersonian method—that was used to enforce the submis- sion of female visionaries to male ecclesiastical authority.2 Composed in the 1370s or 1380s and long-attributed to Vincent Ferrer, the Tractatus de vita spirituali (Treatise on the Spiritual Life), a guide for Dominican novices, stands at the beginning of these developments, on the cusp of the dramatic changes wrought by the Gersonian paradigm.3 Though well-known, this text has remained peripheral to discussions about gender and mysticism;

1 Miri Rubin, “Europe Remade: Purity and Danger in Late Medieval Europe”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 11 (2001), 101–24 (103); Andrew W. Keitt, Inventing the Sacred: Impos ture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain, The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World 25 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 68–69. 2 Wendy Love Anderson, The Discernment of Spirits: Assessing Visions and Visionaries in the Late Middle Ages, Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation 63 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), p. 229. 3 Philip Daileader, Saint Vincent Ferrer, His World and Life: Religion and Society in Late Medieval Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 190–91. Citations of Tractatus de vita spi rituali are from Vincent Ferrer, Biografía y escritos de San Vicente Ferrer, ed. and trans. José M. de Garganta and Vicente Forcada, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos 153 (Madrid: Editorial Católica, 1956), pp. 476–541 (henceforth Tractatus, by page-number). See also the version in Adolfo Robles (trans.), Obras y escritos de San Vicente Ferrer (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Va- lencia, 1996), introductory study pp. 275–300 and Spanish translation pp. 301–46.

Discernment of Spirits and Spiritual Authority 113 indeed, it is surprisingly under-studied in general despite its clear potential to contribute to debates central to late medieval spirituality. Precisely because it was written before the systematic gendering of discernment of spirits, when the issue at stake, ostensibly, was the authority rather than the gender of the visionary, this work invites a full examination.4 That it enjoyed diffusion far beyond its originally intended readership further heightens its interest; over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its teachings were applied to the laity as well as male and female monastics. Whilst the text’s subsequent fortunes have been noted, the full implications of specific instances of editing, translating, and compiling remain underexploited.5 As well as showing the ways in which later readers understood the text itself, these adaptations chart in microcosm the shifting currents of religiosity and spirituality across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; study of them illuminates far more than the fortunes of a single text. A telling example is the Spanish translation produced under the auspices of Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517), and published in Toledo in 1510. This translation appeared as Tratado de la vida e instrucción espiritual in a volume alongside a life of Angela of Foligno and the Rule of St Clare.6 This edition was aimed primarily at those women, religious and lay, under Cisneros’s spiritual oversight as visitor and reformer of the Poor Clares.7 Given the close oversight Cisneros exercised over this and his other textual projects, scrutiny of the relationship between translation and original

4 On the issue of authority versus gender of visionaries see Anderson, The Discernment of Spir its, p. 7. 5 For a brief survey of later uses of the text see Álvaro Huerga, “La edición cisneriana del Tra tado de la vida espiritual y otras ediciones del siglo xvi”, Escritos del Vedat 10 (1980), 297–313; and see the remarks by Pablo Acosta-García in the next chapter in this volume, pp. 146–147. 6 Angela da Foligno, Libro dela bienaventurada sancta Angela de Fulgino [...] Item primera regla dela bienaventurada virgen santa Clara. Item un tractado del bienaventurado sant Vincente dela vida ⁊ instrucion espiritual que deven tener los religiosos ⁊ personas devotas (Toledo: [suce- sor de Pedro Hagenbach], 1510). I have consulted the copy in Madrid, bne R/8583. For a dis- cussion of the contents of this volume see Fernando Gómez Redondo, Historia de la prosa de los Reyes Católicos. El umbral del Renacimiento, 2 vols (Madrid: Cátedra, 2012), i, pp. 118–121. 7 On Cisneros’s wider programme of religious reform see Erika Rummel, Jiménez de Cisneros: On the Threshold of Spain’s Golden Age (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), pp. 18–28; on his reform of the Poor Clares, including the Third Order, José García Oro, El Cardenal Cisneros. Vida y empresas, 2 vols (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cris- tianos, 1992–93), ii, 212–32; and on the reception of the text by lay readers, Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida, “Lecturas y mecenazgo espiritual de la nobleza: el caso del ii Duque de Alba”, in Le tras en la celda: cultura escrita de los conventos femeninos en la España moderna, ed. Nieves Baranda Leturio and Mª Carmen Marín Pina (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2014), pp. 99–114.