The Devotio moderna (c. 1374–1500)

The object must first be situated exactly. The Devotio moderna is often reduced to its most famous spiritual work, the Imitation of Christ, and to a pedagogy of interior prayer. That is true, but insufficient for the historian: the "new devotion" was also, and perhaps first of all, an institutional and social phenomenon — the creation, within a single generation, of a network of houses, schools and monasteries that transformed the religious landscape of the Low Countries and northern Germany.

John Van Engen, in the great contemporary synthesis on the subject, insists precisely on this point: the Devotio moderna was not a new mystical doctrine but a new way of organising Christian life within the world, at the boundary between the laity and the religious state^[1]. Understanding the movement therefore means setting it back into the history of the structures of the late medieval Church: the crisis of the papacy, suspicion towards groups of devout lay people, the reform of the orders, the question of canon law.

The Devotio moderna cannot be explained without the partial collapse of 14th-century ecclesial structures. It is a response to a crisis — and one of the healthiest imaginable: not revolt, but reform from within.

The Avignon papacy and the Western Schism

From 1309 to 1376, the popes resided at Avignon, far from the tomb of Peter; then, from 1378 onwards, Christendom tore itself apart between two, soon three rival obediences — the Western Schism, which would end only with the election of Martin V at the Council of Constance on 11 November 1417 (the council itself closing on 22 April 1418). Groote died in 1384 in the midst of the schismatic turmoil. For devout faithful, the spectacle of two popes excommunicating each other made urgent a religion that would not depend first on the apparatus, but on the conversion of the heart. The Devotio moderna was born of this shift: since the summits were wavering, reform would start at the base.

The Black Death and the collapse of the clergy

The Black Death of 1347–1352 carried off, depending on the region, between a third and half of the European population, and struck hard at a clergy exposed at the bedside of the dying. The rapid replacement of deceased priests brought, in many places, a decline in the moral and intellectual level of the lower clergy. Groote himself had lost his parents in an outbreak of plague in his childhood^[2]. The context is thus one of a weakened clergy, often absentee, accumulating benefices: it is precisely this worldliness that Groote would denounce with the greatest vigour.

Beguines, beghards and suspicion towards devout lay people

Since the 13th century, lay people — above all women, the beguines — had sought an intense life of piety outside the established orders. The Council of Vienne (1311–1312) had condemned certain aberrations of the beghards and cast suspicion on communities of devout people living without an approved rule^[3]. This canonical wariness would weigh heavily on the Devotio moderna: to propose, as Groote would, houses of devout lay people living in common without vows was to expose oneself immediately to the suspicion of heretical beguinage. The entire legal history of the movement would consist in proving its orthodoxy and its submission to the ordinary.

The table below summarises the crisis factors to which the "new devotion" responded, each steering the movement towards a specific solution.

Groote's spiritual biography is treated in the companion article. What interests the Church historian here is his relationship with the authorities: how a brilliant cleric became a reformer, then a licensed preacher, then a forbidden preacher.

From beneficed cleric to penitent deacon

Born at Deventer in 1340 into a wealthy merchant family, Geert Groote pursued brilliant studies at Paris and taught for a time; in the manner of his age, he accumulated several ecclesiastical prebends at Aachen and Utrecht, without yet being a priest^[4]. Around 1374, a profound conversion — often placed after a grave illness — made him break with this career: he renounced his benefices, gave up part of the family house at Deventer to lodge poor devout women (the Meester-Geertshuis), and withdrew for some years to the charterhouse of Monnikhuizen, near Arnhem^[5]. He kept from it a taste for Carthusian austerity, without ever taking vows.

The 1379 licence to preach

In 1379, the bishop of Utrecht ordained him deacon and granted him a licence to preach throughout the diocese. Groote then travelled through Deventer, Zwolle, Utrecht, Amersfoort, Kampen and Delft; his sermons drew crowds and unsparingly denounced simony, the concubinage of clerics and the accumulation of benefices. The crucial point, institutionally, is that he preached with the authorisation of the ordinary: Groote was not a freelance preacher in the manner of heretics, but a mandated reformer.

The 1383 ban and the death of 1384

His vehemence earned him enemies. Under pressure from a clergy under attack, the bishop of Utrecht promulgated in 1383 a decree withdrawing the licence to preach from deacons — and thus from Groote. Groote submitted, appealed to Rome, and devoted himself henceforth to writing and organising his disciples. He died of the plague on 20 August 1384, aged forty-four, while nursing a sick man^[6]. His obedience in the trial — he stopped preaching rather than disobey — is precisely what saved the orthodoxy of the nascent movement: the Devotio moderna inherited a founder submissive to the Church, not a rebel.

"I resolve to covet no benefice, and to acquire nothing by simony." — Geert Groote, Conclusa et proposita, non vota, c. 1374^[7]

Groote left disciples but no approved rule. It was Florens Radewijns (d. 1400), a priest of Deventer, who organised the inheritance — and faced the real problem: how to give a legal status to communities that canon law did not provide for?

The Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life: a religious life without vows

Around Radewijns there formed, from 1381 onwards, houses where clerics and lay people pooled their goods, prayed, copied manuscripts and worked, without pronouncing the three vows of religion. The Sisters of the Common Life, sprung from the Meester-Geertshuis, multiplied from the 1390s onwards under the impetus of Jean Brinckerinck. It was a daring novelty: a life of perfection in the world, founded on free and revocable commitment, not on perpetual vows.

This formula exposed the movement to the accusation of beguinage: in the eyes of rigid jurists, lay people living in common without an approved rule dangerously resembled the condemned beghards. The Brethren therefore had constantly to prove that they obeyed the ordinary, did not beg, earned their bread by copying and teaching, and did not preach publicly without a mandate.

Windesheim (1387): the regular canonical solution

To shelter part of the movement from all legal challenge, Groote's disciples chose a second path, fully recognised by the law: the regular religious life. In 1387, six of them founded the monastery of Windesheim near Zwolle, under the Rule of St Augustine, as canons regular^[8]. The formula was unassailable: they were religious in the strict sense, with vows, enclosure and approval. Windesheim rapidly grew into a congregation (general chapter), which would spread across the whole Germanic world.

Thus did the Devotio moderna advance on two legs: on one side the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life, a devout laity of fragile but flexible status; on the other the Congregation of Windesheim, a solid monastic backbone, canonically irreproachable. This duality is the key to the movement's survival.

"Conclusa, non vota": Groote's legal gamble

The very title of Groote's founding writing — Conclusa et proposita, non vota, "resolutions and proposals, but not vows" — sums up this gamble. Evangelical perfection does not necessarily require the taking of public vows: one may tend towards holiness through a personal commitment, firm yet free. This thesis, commonplace today, was then explosive: it touched on the canonical definition of the state of perfection. It was this thesis that would be brought before the Council of Constance.

The decisive legal trial of the movement was played out at the Council of Constance (5 November 1414 – 22 April 1418)^[9], the great council that ended the Western Schism by electing Martin V. It was there that the legitimacy of the Brethren of the Common Life was challenged in the gravest way.

The Dominican attack: Grabow's indictment

A Saxon Dominican, Matthew Grabow (Matthaeus Grabow), drew up a treatise arguing that lay people living in common without vows led an illegitimate, even heretical way of life: outside the approved orders and the clerical state, no life of perfection was possible. His indictment (libellus), articulated in a series of propositions, directly targeted the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life, likened to the beghards^[10]. Rebuffed by the bishop of Utrecht, Grabow took the case to the council.

Gerson and d'Ailly in defence

The Brethren found defenders of the first rank. The chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson, one of the most heeded theologians of the council, and Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly took their side. Gerson demonstrated that a life of perfection without vows was perfectly lawful: the evangelical counsels could be followed by private commitment, without usurping the religious state. A consilium of doctors, supported by the pontifical privileges already granted to the movement, was presented to the commission on faith^[11].

As historiography summarises it, Gerson's argument in defence of the Brethren holds in two theses: perfection is measured not by the vow but by charity, and the faithful may live in common in piety without binding themselves by solemn vows^[12].

The condemnation of Grabow by Martin V (1419)

The case dragged on beyond the council's closure. In the end it was Grabow's positions that were condemned: in May 1419, the new pope Martin V reprobated his theses on the religious life^[13]. The scope of this judgement goes beyond anecdote: the Church officially recognised that one may tend towards evangelical perfection outside the orders bound by vows. The Devotio moderna emerged from Constance cleared and strengthened — and the debate it had sparked prepared, from afar, the recognition of the future congregations of secular clerics.

The most tangible legacy of the "new devotion" to the ecclesial institution is neither a book nor a doctrine, but a large-scale enterprise of monastic reform conducted by the Congregation of Windesheim.

A congregation of canons regular

Grouped in an annual general chapter, the monasteries of Windesheim adopted common constitutions, a sober liturgy, strict discipline of enclosure and work. This centralised model — rare for the time — gave the congregation a capacity for action and influence that an isolated monastery could never have had.

The reform of monasteries by Johannes Busch

The emblematic figure of this work is the canon Johannes Busch (1399–c. 1479), sent to reform dozens of lax convents in northern Germany. His Liber de reformatione monasteriorum ("Book of the Reform of Monasteries") is the narrative source of the first order for this history: in it Busch recounts, house by house, how he restored common life, enclosure and poverty, not without sometimes violent resistance from the settled religious^[14].

The thread of his account is constant, house after house: on arriving in a lax convent, the reformer had enclosure, observance and common life restored there according to the rule^[15].

This work of Windesheim flowed together with the other great 15th-century observance projects — the Benedictine reform of Bursfelde, the reforms of the mendicants — the whole constituting the pre-Tridentine Catholic reform, too often forgotten in favour of the Protestant Reformation alone.

Nearly a hundred houses by 1500

The success was numerically spectacular. By 1500, the Congregation of Windesheim numbered 102 houses — 86 of canons and 16 of nuns — spread from the Low Countries to Germany^[16][17]. To these must be added the dozens of houses of Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life scattered across the same regions. Within a century, a movement sprung from a single house at Deventer had spread across the whole of north-western Europe.

The Devotio moderna has a very precise birthplace — the IJssel valley, with the Deventer–Zwolle–Windesheim triangle — and an area of expansion reaching far beyond the present-day Netherlands.

The Brethren of the Common Life spread above all through the merchant towns of the Low Countries and the Rhineland: Deventer, Zwolle, 's-Hertogenbosch, Cologne, Münster, Magdeburg. At the start of the 16th century there were several dozen houses of Brethren; the Sisters of the Common Life were more numerous still, with a dense network in the Low Countries and a substantial presence in Germany^[18]. The Windesheim congregation pushed its foundations as far as Saxony and Westphalia.

This geography is not incidental: it is that of towns, merchants, Latin schools and, soon, the printing press. The Devotio moderna is an urban and lettered phenomenon, which explains its cultural influence, far greater than its numerical weight.

Two activities materially characterise the movement and ground its historical importance: the copying of books and teaching.

Scriptoria and the printing press

Copying manuscripts was, for the Brethren, at once an honest livelihood, an exercise in humility and an apostolate: they spread spiritual, liturgical and school texts in Latin as well as in the vernacular. Groote and Radewijns had from the outset produced a book of hours in Dutch for the laity — a remarkable act of religious popularisation. When the printing press appeared, several houses of Brethren adopted the press: the Low Countries region became one of the most productive centres of publishing in Europe, a fact historians link directly to the literacy effort carried by the movement^[19].

A network of Latin schools

The houses of Brethren maintained or supervised leading Latin schools, notably at Deventer and Zwolle. These schools trained generations of pupils who would count in the Church and in culture: future humanists and reformers passed through them in various capacities. Without being universities, these schools spread a Christian culture of letters that prepared the northern humanism.

One of the most discussed chapters of this history is the link between the "new devotion" and the Christian humanism of the 15th–16th century.

Nicholas of Cusa, Wessel Gansfort, Gabriel Biel

Several leading figures passed through the movement's schools or influence. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), the great philosopher and reformer, was educated by the Brethren of Deventer. The theologian Wessel Gansfort (d. 1489) and Gabriel Biel (d. 1495), who organised a house of Brethren at Butzbach and taught at Tübingen, belong to the same current^[20]. Through them, the Devotio moderna irrigated the university theology and learned culture of its time.

Erasmus, pupil of Deventer

The most famous case is that of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), educated at the school of Deventer under Master Alexander Hegius^[21]. Erasmus would keep from this education a taste for Scripture, evangelical simplicity and interior piety, even as he later criticised the rusticity of his masters. His Philosophia Christi — a Christianity recentred on the imitation of Christ and the interior life — bears the mark, transposed into humanism, of the "new devotion". It is one of the bridges between the Devotio moderna and the Christian Renaissance.

We touch here on the great historiographical question of the subject, and on a matter that is not merely scholarly: was the Devotio moderna a "pre-Protestantism", a medieval root of the rupture of 1517? The rigorous answer is no — and we must see why.

Albert Hyma's "pre-Protestant" thesis

In 1924, the American historian Albert Hyma published The Christian Renaissance: A History of the Devotio Moderna^[22]. In it he defended an attractive and influential thesis: the "new devotion" was said to be a "Christian renaissance" heralding both humanism and the Protestant Reformation; its interiority, its mistrust of scholasticism and its Christocentrism were said to prefigure Luther. This reading, long repeated, makes the Devotio moderna a link in the "prehistory" of Protestantism.

R. R. Post's refutation: a fully Catholic movement

In 1968, in a work of nearly seven hundred pages, the Dutch historian Régnerus Richardus Post methodically refuted this thesis^[23]. Post showed that the Devotio moderna remained entirely Catholic in doctrine and practice: attachment to the Mass, the sacraments, confession, the cult of the Virgin and the saints, obedience to the hierarchy, the religious life. Nothing in its writings anticipates sola fide, sola scriptura, or the rejection of vows or the priesthood. The very title of the work — Confrontation with Reformation and Humanism — indicates that the movement was confronted with the Reformation and humanism, not their matrix.

"The Brethren of the Common Life exercised only a limited influence on Luther and the nascent Reformation; their formation did not determine his theology." — Summary of the conclusions of R. R. Post, The Modern Devotion, E. J. Brill, 1968^[24]

Luther and the Brethren: a school, not a theology

The argument frequently advanced to attach Luther to the movement is that he was, around 1497, a schoolboy in a house of Brethren at Magdeburg. The fact is correct, but Post shows its limits: spending a year in a school kept by Brethren does not make Luther a doctrinal heir of the Devotio moderna. His theology of justification came from elsewhere — from the nominalist via moderna, from Augustine read against scholasticism, from his personal experience. The following table summarises the opposition between the two readings.

The conclusion stands: the Devotio moderna belongs to the history of the Catholic reform, not to the prehistory of Protestantism. It proves, against the narrative that reserves all reform to the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, that the medieval Church was already reforming itself from within, and that it had the resources to do so.

Far from leading to rupture, the "new devotion" nourished the great Catholic renewal of the 16th century.

The Imitation, spiritual matrix of the Catholic reform

The movement's flagship work, the Imitation of Christ — composed c. 1418–1427 by Thomas a Kempis at Mount St Agnes — became, after the Bible, the most copied then the most printed Christian book. Its spirituality of interiority and renunciation is directly inherited from the Devotio moderna.

"Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity, except to love God and serve Him alone." — Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, book I, chapter 1^[25]

This book irrigated the whole Catholic reform. St Ignatius of Loyola read it daily and had his companions read it; the spirit of the Imitation passed into the Spiritual Exercises and, through them, into the Society of Jesus and the whole spirituality of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The line thus runs from Deventer to Trent, not from Deventer to Wittenberg.

The decline and end of the movement

The movement, paradoxically, declined along with the century it had helped prepare. The spread of printing made the Brethren's copying work less necessary; the Protestant Reformation convulsed the Low Countries and northern Germany, the very cradle regions; the wars of religion and secularisation scattered the houses. In the 16th and 17th centuries, most houses of Brethren disappeared, while the Congregation of Windesheim withered. The last surviving house, in Germany, would not be dissolved until the early 19th century^[26]. But the essential had already been handed on: a type of holiness — interior, humble, laborious, ecclesial — of which the Imitation of Christ remains the universal witness.

• Devotio Moderna: A Spiritual Movement of the Middle Ages — the companion article, centred on spiritual doctrine, the method of prayer and the Imitation of Christ.
• The Western Schism (1378–1417) — the ecclesial crisis contemporary with the movement, resolved at Constance.
• The Avignon Papacy (1309–1376) — the other great cause of the 14th-century religious malaise.
• The University of Paris and Scholasticism — the learned theology to which the devout opposed interiority, and the milieu of Jean Gerson.
• The Christian Renaissance (15th–16th century) — the cultural and spiritual renewal the Devotio moderna helped prepare.
• The Protestant Reformation (1517–1555) — to distinguish the movement's Catholic spirit from the 16th-century rupture.
• The Foundation of the Society of Jesus (1521–1556) — the legacy of the Imitation in the Exercises of St Ignatius.