Ottó Gecser Budapest, Eötvös Loránd University “Mass Communication” on the Eve of Printing: Sermon and Treatise in John of Capistrano In Authorship and Publicity before Print, Daniel Hobbins has advanced a well-argued and widely acclaimed thesis on the transformation of theological publishing in the Late Middle Ages In his view, masters of theology at the leading universities gradually turned away from writing highly technical works directed mainly at their peers, and began to prefer works addressed to broader groups of society with topics deemed pertinent to them as well Te genre specifcally suitable for such more occasional and less scholarly publications was the tract defned by Hobbins as “a treatment of a single moral case with some connection to the world outside the university in a form brief enough to be easily distributed” 1 Hobbins focuses on Jean Gerson (1363-1429), who is undoubtedly a protagonist of this story of change and may well have served as a model for others One of Hobbins’ major examples is the tract Super facto puellae et credulitate sibi praestanda on Joan of Arc Gerson wrote a frst version of it in Lyon on 14 May 1429, merely six days after the victory of French troops led by Joan over the English in Orléans Te most complete version of the text, including Gerson’s defense of Joan’s male dress, was used only a month later by the Dominican Jean Dupuy for his chronicle in Rome, and six months later, in November, it was sent by an Italian merchant, Pancrazio Giustiniani, from Bruges (the heartland Te writing of this essay was supported by a research grant (no NN 125463) from the Nemzeti Kutatási, Fejlesztési és Innovációs Hivatal (National Bureau of Research, Development, and Innovation) If not indicated otherwise, all translations and emendations of sources quoted are mine – OG 1 Daniel HOBBINS, Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia PA, 2009), p 56