Jean Gerson, former chancellor of the University of Paris, after returning in 1419 from the Tyrol to France,  had gone to Lyon, where his brother was prior of the Celestine monastery.

Although Gerson is retired from active university life, the past decade at Lyon has been a time of great literary productivity.

He has produced a harmony of the gospels (the Monotesseron), works on the poems of the bible climaxing in a massive collection of twelve treatises on the Magnificat (Lk. 1:46-55), a commentary on the Song of Songs, as well as an extensive literary correspondence with members of the Carthusian order and others on mysticism and other issues of spiritual life.

Shortly before his death at sixty-five on July 12, 1429, he produces a tract in support of Joan of Arc.