The Devotio Moderna, or Modern Devout, puzzled their contemporaries. Beginning in the 1380s in market towns along the Ijssel River of the east-central Netherlands and in the county of Holland, they formed households organized as communes and forged lives centered on private devotion. They lived on city streets alongside their neighbors, managed properties and rents in common, and worked in the textile and book trades, all the while refusing to profess vows as members of any religious order or to acquire spouses and personal property as lay citizens. They defended their self-designed style of life as exemplary and sustained it in the face of opposition, their women labeled "beguines" and their men "lollards," both meant as derogatory terms. Yet the movement grew, drawing in women and schoolboys, priests and laymen, and spreading outward toward Münster, Flanders, and Cologne.
The Devout were arguably more culturally significant than the Lollards and Beguines, yet they have commanded far less scholarly attention in English. John Van Engen's magisterial book keeps the Modern Devout at its center and thinks through their story anew. Few interpreters have read the Devout so insistently within their own time and space by looking to the social and religious conditions that marked towns and parishes in northern Europe during the fifteenth century and examining the widespread upheavals in cultural and religious life between the 1370s and the 1440s. In 'Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life', Van Engen grasps the Devout in their humanity, communities, and beliefs, and places them firmly within the urban societies of the Low Countries and the cultures we call late medieval.
Author(s): John Van Engen
Series: The Middle Ages Series
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 446
City: Philadelphia
List of Illustrations
Introduction: The Devotio Moderna and Modern History
Chapter 1: Converts in the Middle Ages
Conversion as a Medieval Form of Life
Converts in the Low Countries
Circles of Converts at Strassburg and Brussels
Converts under Suspicion: Legislating against Beguines and Free Spirits
Chapter 2: Modern-Day Converts in the Low Countries
The Low Countries
Households of Devout Women
Societies of Devout Women
Modern-Day Conversion
Chapter 3: Suspicion and Inquisition
Suspicion of Devout Practices
Charge and Counter-Charge in the Mid-1390s
Sisters under Inquisition, 1396–1397: Friar Eylard Schoneveld Intervenes
Resisting the Inquisitor: Legal Tactics
Awaiting the Bishop’s Decision, 1398–1401
Chapter 4: From Converts to Communities: Tertiaries, Sisters, Brothers, Schoolboys, Canons
Tertiaries 'Living the Common Life'
Sisters of the Common Life
Brothers of the Common Life
Schoolboys
Windesheim Canons and Canonesses
An Option for Enclosure: Male Canons and Female Tertiaries
Chapter 5: Inventing a Communal Household: Goods, Customs, Labor, and 'Republican' Harmony
Living Together without Personal Property
House Customs and Personal Exercises
Obedience and Humility in a Voluntary Community
Labor: Living from the Work of their Own Hands
Communal Gatherings and a 'Republican' Impulse
Chapter 6: Defending the Modern-Day Devout: Expansion under Scrutiny
Women’s Houses and Converting Schoolboys: Burgher Critics at Zwolle
Friar Matthew Grabow and the Council of Constance
The Sisters and the Aldermen in Conflict at Deventer: The Women’s Narrative
Institutionalizing under Scrutiny
Chapter 7: Proposing a Theological Rationale: The Freedom of the 'Christian Religion'
Place in Society: Taking on the 'Estate of the Perfect'
John Pupper of Goch (d. 1475)
Gospel Law and the Freedom of the Christian Religion
Chapter 8: Taking the Spiritual Offensive: Caring for the Self, Examining the Soul, Progressing in Virtue
Reading, Writing, and the Lay Tongue
Exhortation in Public and Correction in Private
Spiritual Guidance and Mutual Reproof
Modern-Day Devotion: Examining the Self, Making Progress, Experiencing Peace
Conclusion: Private Gatherings and Self-Made Societies in the Fifteenth Century
The Question of an Afterlife
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
