New Devotion in the Low Countries

JOHN VAN ENGEN New Devotion in the Low Countries The townspeople of thirteenth-century Italy witnessed a revolution in religious life. Francis took religion out into the streets, out of the cloister, out of cathe- dral quarters and collegiate churches, out of rural “desert” retreats, initially indeed out of the hands of “clerics.” The followers of Francis and Dominic, acting as professed religious, would eventually preach and teach and hear con- fession. But they interacted with people in the street and their own houses, and asked daily for bread and money in support. They conceived “religion” in new ways, as no longer restricted to intercessory or contemplative prayer, no longer requiring that they withdraw into seclusion or live off fields and endow- ments. Friars transformed a thousand-year-old understanding of religious perfection as essentially monastic and contemplative in character. They justified the pursuit of an active life, adding to their prayerful mission one of teaching and spiritual guidance. In so doing they helped change the shape of towns and town-life, of pastoral care and piety. Women shared in these new enthusiasms, perhaps even disproportionately, and became significant exemplars for the future, Marie d’Oignies of Nivelles for beguines, Elizabeth of Marburg for hos- pice-workers. But apart from beguines no comparably dramatic new institu- tional forms would prove socially viable for women, despite the valiant efforts of Clare and others; likewise, not for laypeople despite efforts by Peter Waldo, Lambert le Begues, and Francis himself to imagine non-priestly vocations. For women something like cloistered ways of life persisted, sometimes more so, sometimes less, but now with greater access to preaching and teaching. For laypeople, enhanced involvement came by way of confraternities and tertiary asso- ciations. This religious revolution spread across Europe, and its spiritual dimensions were felt far beyond mendicant convents. An intense focus upon Christ in his humanity and his passion, a ready use of images and the vernacular, an openness to acting among ordinary people – all this entered so fully into western Christian culture that we can hardly imagine religious life differently anymore. For that reason we often, understandably, but mistakenly, have under- stated the radical dimensions of this mendicant revolution.1 1 For the spread of the friars and of the beguines, the most significant recent work for the Low Countries has been done by Walter Simons, Stad en apostolaat: de vestiging van de bedelorden in het graafschap Vlaanderen, ca. 1225-ca. 1350 (Brussels 1987), and Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565 (Philadelphia 2001), both with extensive bibliographies. For an eventual link between friars and the beguines, see, for instance, Andreas Wilts, Beginen im Bodenseeraum (Sigmaringen 1994). For the mendicant “revolution,” see my “Dominic and the Brothers: Vitae as Life-forming exempla in the Order of Preachers,” in: Christ Among the Medieval Dominicans, ed. Kent Emery, Jr. and Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame, 1998), pp. 7-25. 236 JOHN VAN ENGEN So far I have told you nothing new. Less well known was another revolution in religion, nearly as important and transforming, I think, this one manifest in the towns of the Low Countries and most influential in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.2 We have no recognized name for this moment in the re- making of religious life. We associate notions of “revolution” with Lollards in England or the Hussites in Bohemia, groups that ended up in overt rebellion against the established church. Their restless re-thinking and re-shaping of religious life should not be isolated, however, from other “Devout” movements in the later middle ages, diverse in character and scope but sharing common con- cerns and aspirations. In that world, I would argue, the Devotio Moderna gave expression to some of its more salient and lasting features. The “Modern Devotion” has sparked scholarly and popular study since the mid-nineteenth century, with, at times, a tendency to use that term for a host of figures, movements or teachings at best distantly related to it. Some have sought in it the origins of the Reformation or even the northern Renaissance. Some Catholic scholars, in reaction, characterized the movement as safely traditional – perhaps too safely traditional. This second revolution, as I am calling it, left fewer visible markers in surviving townscapes. With respect to texts, however, its impact was incalculable, especially vernacular texts, as we now know, thanks to Thom Mertens and many others. With respect to devotion, moreover, its approach to perfection, over time, entered into the mainstream. Thomas’s Imitation of Christ, to give but a single example, became the single most widely-read book of the fifteenth century (and on into early modern Christianity). This historical reality has not received the full attention it deserves. In this revolution, too, women played a significant role, as participants, as organizers, as consumers of religious literature and devotion, sometimes as writers. My purpose today is to present for consideration this moment of transformation in the understanding and practice of religion, with the Low Countries as an emblematic site. I call it here a “second revolution,” after that of the friars’, not to make extravagant or sensational claims but to keep us historically alert, help us see difference and not fall back on commonplaces, not see its practices simply as slight refinements of inherited ones. THE HOMELAND We need to take seriously the geographical setting: the Low Lands, a fourteenth-century term and a historical problem, as you are aware. Allow me, an American speaking English, to remind you of what you know (though most 2 These phenomena are not limited to the Low Countries, and have generated an enormous literature on late medieval spirituality, especially its literary and visual dimensions. There is, at the moment, in my view, no real “sorting” of all this work or any single leading thesis. For one approach, by way of differing notions of “conversion,” see my “Conversion and Conformity in the Early Fifteenth Century,” Conversions Old and New, edited by Anthony Grafton and Kenneth Mills (Rochester NY 2003), pp. 30-65. For a more visual approach, see the stimulating essays of Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York 1998). NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 237 outside your region do not), also to say it in broad terms without regard for polit- ical sensitivities some may want to observe. I begin with the chief chronicler of the Devotio Moderna, Johan Busch. In his account, drafted in the later 1450s, he set out to treat “the origins of the present-day devotion of all the devout priests, clerics, and sisters or beguines throughout our land in the region of Germany” (liber de origine moderne devocionis omnium devotorum presbyte- rorum clericorum et sororum sive beginarum tocius nostre patrie regionis Almanie). Historians have fixed upon his use of the term “Modern Devotion,” found first, before 1420, in the life of Jan Ruusbroec written at Groenendael by Henry Pomerius. What interests me is the phrase usually passed over: “the whole of our homeland.” This was a movement recognized as arising out of, and touching broadly, their land – not coming to them from Italy or France or England. About 1450 Prior William Vornken of Windesheim, a native of Utrecht, referred to “the modern-day devotion in our homeland.” Johan Busch invoked this notion of “homeland” liberally in his account, and has the prior John Vos preach a sermon (about 1424) to the foregathered brothers and canons to remind them of their origins, of those who founded and fostered “this devotion and religious way of life throughout our homeland” (huius tocius patrie nostre devocio religiosa conversatio), evident now, he says, in “so many and such different kinds of people of both sexes” (in tot et tantis diversarum perso- narum utriusque sexus).3 So what was their homeland, the site of “new devotion” in their day? Pomerius referred to “lower Germany” (in bassa Almania), rendered in Dutch as “across the IJssel River” (over die Yssele), Vornken to “our land” as “these parts of the lower earth” (in hac nostra terra, in hiis inferioris terre partibus), and Johan Busch to a “region in Germany.” I am going to use the term “Low Countries” and explain what I mean by it. Their term “homeland” had, I think, a larger and a narrower meaning. The larger sense encompassed the whole northwest corner of Europe. We should imagine a wide angle, its point more or less in Cologne, then opening out to the sea, its southern and western line following more or less the border of the French Kingdom (but including, cru- cially, Flanders as well as Hainaut), its northern and eastern line heading roughly past Münster and trailing off in eastern Frisia, stretching on occasion into the plains eastward from the Rhine where Low German (Niederdeutsch) was the local language. Most of the land within this wide angle was drained by rivers flowing west or north, with Cologne on the Rhine its largest city and riverport, also its most significant ecclesiastical capital. Much of this land belonged formally to the Medieval German Empire (hence bassa Almania), 3 Between his first and second editions (1458, 1464), Johan Busch altered the title of what had originally been his opening section, from “Liber deuotus de origine monasterii in Wyndesem ordinis canonicorum regularium Traiectensis dyocesis, et omnium deuotorum presbiterorum, clericorum et sororum totius patrie regionis Almannie” (Brussels, Royal Library, IV 110), to “Liber de origine deuocionis moderne, de origine monasterii in Windesem… et de origine capi- tuli nostri generalis….” Busch, Chronicon Windesehemense, ed.

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