The Late Medieval Era · c. 1380-1517 · Low Countries
Devotio Moderna / Brethren of the Common Life
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About This Movement
It began with Geert Grote, a wealthy and worldly Deventer scholar who gave up his career, opened his own house to a group of devout women, and started preaching repentance in the towns of the IJssel valley. After his death in 1384 his followers organized: Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, living together and supporting themselves by copying manuscripts and other ordinary work, without vows and without leaving ordinary society, alongside a stricter branch of canons at Windesheim. What held them together was less a doctrine than a method — a plain, interior, methodical devotion, and the habit of keeping a rapiarium, a personal notebook of gathered passages to return to. One such gathering, worked up by Thomas à Kempis at a house near Zwolle, became the Imitation of Christ. The houses also took in schoolboys and shaped the Latin schools of towns like Deventer and Zwolle, which is how the movement's formation reached far more people than ever joined it.
Sources
- Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings (ed./trans. John Van Engen, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1988) (primary) — Geert Grote's own writings (incl. Resolutions and Intentions - a layman's self-rule), lives of the Brothers and Sisters, customary material, from Latin and Middle Dutch - founder's voice and communal texture in one volume.
- Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (c. 1418-27) (primary) — The movement's mass-formation engine - the era's most copied book after the Bible, grown out of the rapiarium practice. Countless editions exist, with no single standard translation.
- The sisters' houses literature: vitae of the Sisters of the Common Life at Deventer (Master Geert's House) and Diepenveen (primary) — Collective women's memory in the movement's own genre; partly available in Van Engen's volume, though the fuller corpus survives only in Middle Dutch.
- Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen, The Spiritual Ascents, plus the rapiarium practice (primary) — The movement's method text - interiorized, graded devotion for people in ordinary life - and its distinctive excerpt-book genre.
- John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life (Penn, 2008) (secondary) — Current standard, by the corpus's own translator.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 26 'Empowerment through reading, writing and example: the Devotio Moderna' (Goudriaan) (reference) — A dedicated chapter, one of the strongest reference fits for this movement. Its influence on Luther and the Jesuits reaches beyond 1500, but the movement's own historical window closes around that year.