Devotio moderna

Devotio Moderna, or Modern Devotion, was a movement for religious reform, calling for apostolic renewal through the rediscovery of genuine pious practices such as humility, obedience and simplicity of life. It began in the late fourteenth-century, largely through the work of Gerard Groote, and flourished in the Low Countries and Germany in the fifteenth century, but came to an end with the Protestant Reformation. It is most known today through its influence on Thomas à Kempis, the author of The Imitation of Christ, a book which proved highly influential for centuries.

The origins of the movement probably go back to the Congregation of Windesheim, though it has so far proved elusive to locate precise origin of the movement. Broadly, it may be seen to rise out of a widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the church (both in terms of the structure of the church and the personal lives of the clergy) in fourteenth-century Europe. Geert Groote (1340-1384) was among many in being highly dissatisfied with the state of the Church and what he perceived as the gradual loss of monastic traditions and the lack of moral values among the clergy, and he sought to rediscover genuine pious practices.

Devotio Moderna began as a lay movement – around 1374 Groote established his parental house in Deventer into a hostel for poor women who wished to serve God. Though similar to beguine houses, this hostel, and later communities of what came to be called the “Sisters of the Common Life”, were freer in structure than the beguines and kept no private property. The women who lived in these houses remained, also, under the jurisdiction of city authorities and parish priests. Their way of life therefore sat somewhere between ordinary Christian existence ‘in the world’, and the formation of an ecclesiastically recognised religious order.

From this point, a number of different loose forms of community emerged. On the one hand, various forms of life for the female Devout were formed. Especially from the 1390s under the leadership of John Brinckerinck, one of Grote’s early converts, the Sisters of the Common Life spread across the Netherlands and into Germany (with eventually about 25 houses in the former, and about 60 houses in the latter). There were also, however, many houses (mostly small and poor) inspired by the movement that were never formally attached to the Sisters of the Common Life, and may eventually have become Third Order Franciscans or Augustinian nuns.

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