SOURCE: Ozment, Steven. “The Spiritual Traditions: Critics of Scholasticism.” In The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe, pp. 73-82. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980.

In the following excerpt, Ozment sketches out the main lines of Gerson's thought.

By the end of the fourteenth century, when scholasticism had run its course as a creative movement and its excesses and limitations had become all too evident, critics returned to patristic and monastic ideals in an effort to revive traditional religious life both within and beyond the universities. Two of the most effective late medieval spiritual reformers were trained scholastics themselves: Jean Gerson and Nicholas of Clémanges. In bringing together traditional spiritual complaints against the schoolmen, they set forth independently many of the substantive criticisms and reforms of the humanists. So effective were these native critics of scholasticism that modern...