New Devotion in the Low Countries

JOHN VAN ENGEN

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 confession. 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 hospice-workers. But apart from beguines no comparably dramatic new institutional 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 concerns 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 political 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. Karl Grube (Halle 1886), p. 245. For the quoted title, see p. 251, for the sermon of John Vos p. 48. Willem Vornken, Epistola, ed. J.G.R. Acquoy, Het klooster te Windesheim en zijn invloed (Utrecht 1880) 3. 237, 238. 238 JOHN VAN ENGEN though Flanders did not. And in much of it forms of Dutch and/or Low German were the native tongue, though not the Romance-speaking imperial bishoprics of Liège and Cambrai or the diocese of Tournai (whose dioceses nonetheless included Dutch-speaking lands) or the county of Hainaut. Nearly everywhere towns were important, if not nearly so politically dominant as in Italy: several serving as bishoprics and administrative centers (Cologne, Liège, Utrecht, Cambrai, Tournai), many as commercial centers large or small (Bruges, Ghent, Valenciennes, Lille, the towns of Holland, of Brabant, and the IJssel river valley). Counties too played an important role (Flanders, Holland, Gelderland, Brabant). This delta-land lacked significant natural boundaries or barriers, however, which goes far to explain its tangled political history and, importantly, its function as a crossroads, commercial and cultural but also religious. For most people, broad terms such as “lower Germany” or “Low Countries” carried little meaning, and elicited little emotional allegiance. What counted as “homeland” was a specific region, territory, city, or diocese. Hence within this stretch of lands vaguely called “Low” it made all the difference where you were born or lived, where on the ground you stood and looked out from. Johan Busch, at home in the IJssel river valley (Zwolle and Windesheim) spoke of monasteries and congregations as spreading “throughout this our homeland” (per totam istam patriam), and then specified eleven territories: Salland, Westphalia, Gelderland, Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, Drenthe, Twenthe, Frisia, Utrecht, and the (lower) Rhineland (circa partes Reni). He looked round him in concentric circles, one might say, with the east (Westphalia) coming as quickly to mind as the west (Holland) or south (Brabant) – rightly for a native of his region. From the perspective of Thomas of Kempen, that is, one born in the lower Rhine valley, resident in Deventer and Zwolle, Master Geert had preached to convert souls in cities subject to the bishopric of Utrecht (Deventer, Zwolle, Kampen = Oversticht), then in Utrecht itself (= Nedersticht). The movement thereafter spread to nearby territories (proximas regiones) – Holland, Gelderland, and Brabant – and to still farther regions (dehinc ad remotiores partes) – Flanders, Frisia, Westphalia, and Saxony.4 Contrariwise, if you looked out from Brabant, as Johan Gielemans did at about the same time as Johan Busch, specifically from Rooklooster outside Brussels, then this province, with its great teachers and monastic houses, formed the organizing center of religious and historical life. He compiled in nine great codices an entire view of history, the church, and especially the saints, which made Brabant its focal point – just as the dukes of Burgundy increasingly made Brussels their main residence. This outlook, I argued earlier, also informed the standpoint taken by Petrus Impens in his history of the Devout a generation later, he looking out from Tienen and Louvain. From this vantage-point Ruusbroec is the true origin of the Devotion, not Master Geert; canons and canonesses its center, not Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life; and Brabant its heartland, not the IJssel River Valley.5

4 Busch, Chronicon, ed. Grube, p. 42; Thomas, Dialogus 2.15: ed. Pohl, 7.76. 5 For this view, and additional bibliography, see my “A Brabantine Perspective on the Origins of the Modern Devotion: The First Book of Petrus Impens’ Compendium Decursus Temporum NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 239

So the Devout spread throughout these Low Countries as their homeland. But in practice they located houses in their town or region, where they felt most at home and could use their native tongue. Deventer, for instance, had been an important ecclesiastical site since the tenth century, a riverport connected to the Hansa, an entrepot with thriving fairs five times a year, a major town with a Holy Ghost hospice, a friar’s church, a beguinage, two parishes (one connected to Premonstratensian canons), and a school that brought young men in droves from the west (Holland), sometimes the southwest (Flanders), and regu- larly from the southeast (the Rhine basin, including Thomas of Kempen). Louvain, where the Devout also went early, was a ducal residence, then a commercial center and university town. In this region there were also powerful courts, with centers of patronage for professed religious and for painters, but the more lowly Devout, for the most part, organized their households and settled in or near towns. They depended upon local financial networks and legal resources, even when their houses evolved into retreats and major religious houses, as at Groenendael in the woods outside Brussels or Windesheim outside Zwolle and Deventer. And yet, to sum up, despite this local sense of place, including rivalries and differences in language, the Low Countries thrived as a common cultural network. Across it we can find distinct forms of devotion and religious life, and can follow the spread of influential religious texts. Its out- lying influence reached as far south as Paris on occasion or as far west as England, though more commonly traveling east into the Empire and south up the Rhine. After the loss of manuscripts in post-Reformation Netherlands (and then post-revolutionary Liège), the best repositories for texts of the Devotio Moderna today, outside Brussels and the Hague, and later repositories like Berlin and Vienna, are Cologne, where texts circulated early, Liège (from the Crosiers’s house in Huy), and Düsseldorf. What was the quality of religious life in this their homeland around the year 1400? Devout authors expressed two opposing views, partly regional, north and south, and modern authors have drawn upon these in contrary ways. Some modern historians, citing remarks made by the Devout themselves, especially Johan Busch, emphasize that this region, in the late fourteenth century, was little more than a wasteland in religious terms, no strong devotion, no good houses for a zealous convert, no important preachers. Historians, even allowing for the critical stance typical of reformers, have taken this as largely right, as describing a region religiously under-developed, on the far northern edges of all the cultural and religious achievement that had marked thirteenth-century Europe. But at the same time, farther south, beginning much earlier, interpreters have found a religious climate that had become, so to speak, “over-heated,” fostering all sorts of enthusiasms nearly uncontrollable ever since the time of Marie d’Oignies. Think of all the Cistercian and beguine women whose lives tell of amazing extremes in devotion and austerity (and whose cases have deeply

Monasterii Christifere Bethleemitice Puerpere,” in: Serta Devota in memoriam Guillelmi Lourdaux, Pars Prior: Devotio Windeshemensis (Leuven, 1992), pp. 3-78. 240 JOHN VAN ENGEN influenced modern interpreters, whether Roisin or Bynum). Think of Hadewijch and Beatrice writing innovatively in Dutch, mostly in Brabant. Think of Marguerite writing so provocatively in French in Valenciennes. Think of those unruly spirits – including the mysterious Bloemardinne – who provoked Jan Ruusbroec in Brussels to write his correctives and alternatives in his native Dutch beginning in the 1330s. And remember, too, just one more example: the most important of late medieval feasts, Corpus Christi, spread outwards from Liège. As historical interpreters, we are left with a contradictory or bi-polar image. To put it simply, some historians would have the Devotio Moderna arise in the north, in an under-developed part of medieval Europe; others in a southern region, long a hotbed of enthusiasts. How should we sort through this? We may concede real regional differences, and recognize an element of truth in both. All the same, Deventer and the IJssel river valley were not the back- woods, indeed were in those days nearly as thriving as the towns of Holland. And in the south Brussels and Louvain, where the Devotio especially took hold, were, by contrast, less developed than Bruges or Ghent or Liège. We must be careful of easy social or regional correlations, since religious and cultural impulses have their own dynamic. At the same time we cannot separate religious life from its social and cultural environment. In Italy, our first revolution, the thriving of the friars had everything to do with town-life, and their revolution in turn followed, also spawned, new town-life across Europe. So too town life in the southern Low Countries and the Rhineland allowed the beguines to flourish. For reasons both social and ecclesiastical the activist vision of the friars, however, left little space for women and for the unlearned, still largely restricted to cloisters or fields or shops. The towns and cities of the Low Countries – Cologne, Liège, Huy, Brussels, and all the others – bring us to the heartland of the beguines. Scholars have often studied the Devout and the beguines separately, for reasons I need not take up here. But, before turning to the Devout and what their form of religious culture represents, I would like to point up some commonalities and continuities.6 We find in both large numbers of women devoting themselves to an extraordinary religious life, sometimes very large numbers, and we find nearly all their houses subject ordinarily to the oversight of local town councils responsible for issuing the governing statutes, not to constitutions imposed by or governed through an international religious order. We find writings in the vernacular, often with the precise source of their teachings and texts obscure. We also find persistence in this lifestyle despite criticism and suspicion and even condem- nation, in part because they enjoyed a fair measure of local support. All this is

6 The best work on this remains that of F.W.J. Koorn, “Women without Vows: The Case of the Beguines and the Sisters of the Common Life in the Northern Netherlands,” in: Women and Men in Spiritual Culture, XIV-XVII Centuries, E. Schulte van Kessel, ed. (The Hague 1986), pp. 135-47; also “Ongebonden vrouwen: Overeenkomsten en verschillen tussen begijnen en zusters des Gemenen Levens,” Ons geestelijk erf 59 (1985), pp. 393-402. NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 241 noteworthy. We might even think of beguine women as bringing off in the Low Countries what the female followers of Francis in Italian towns largely could not: setting up a form of intense religious life still semi-lay in character, not under religion as such. Beguines far outnumbered Beghards; so Sisters would far outnumber Brothers, though canonesses, those under vow, did not outnumber canons. It may be worth asking (socially, politically, even culturally) why all this proved possible in the Low Countries but less so in Italy? To be sure, there existed intriguing counterparts in the south, self-styled recluses as well as the Mantellate (the group with which Catherine of Siena first associated in the 1360s) and the beguins associated with Spiritual Franciscans around Marseille. Devout women too were routinely called “beguines,” sometimes generically, sometimes critically and scornfully.

A “SELF-MADE” RELIGIOUS LIFE

I would like to single out a particular dynamic, evident to a degree in beguine communities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that manifestly took hold among the Devout, firmly and intentionally: a sense of styling their own religious life, locally and also internally. This opened beguines and beghards to suspicion, charges of variant teachings and lifestyles. But it also allowed them freedom to shape lifestyles, and occasionally teachings, on their own. In practice, they had to work closely with urban magistrates, and usually with friars who served as their priests and spiritual guides. Because they came under suspicion, the point remained a sensitive one, with local authorities ready to intervene to restore social order and clerical authorities to oversee religious order. It is therefore all the more striking that the Devout, from the beginning, moved decisively and boldly in this direction, the leadership kept almost entirely inside their own circles. Consider this. Jan Ruusbroec made his own way, as local priest, as teacher and vernacular writer, as hermit, then as canon regular. Geert Grote, too, well aware of Ruusbroec’s way, made his own: cleric, non-ordained preacher and sponsor of devout households, consultant on the religious life, self-consciously determined to live as a religious but not within or under religion. He wrote or helped design statutes meant to forestall trouble from both the orders and the local magistrates, and yet to permit these houses to function as centers of communal devotional life. Both Ruusbroec and Grote, it is worth noting, could sharply criticize those who went astray in forming their own way of life, but without in any way abandoning that path for themselves. Sisters in households, too, made their way, perhaps under somewhat more oversight, but their own way nonetheless, whether in households or at Diepenveen. The lives written by these women emphasize their singular role in building their own houses, shaping its life, working toward its support, even fending off hostile magistrates. This was equally true for the men, who enjoyed more social freedom to style a legally recognized commune, something truly hybrid, unusual, an urban household that governed itself as a religious 242 JOHN VAN ENGEN commune.7 So too all the written “exercises” that have come down to us, an intriguing part of their religious bequest, represented individual efforts to design a personal devout regimen, and to live it out. It is striking, too little noted, that Thomas of Kempen, by then a professed canon, regarded these “self-made Devout” as the true “fathers” and explicitly quoted their exercises, in appen- dices to the lives, as his models for the professed. The degree to which Brothers and Sisters developed formally recognized customaries or statutes, beyond the exercises designed for themselves or for a local house, is now a matter of debate.8 Even the eventual turn of the Devout to profession as regular canons or canonesses, styled as a means to stabilize and protect their religious congregations, at Groenendael, Windesheim, or Diepenveen, represented precisely this kind of self-made choice. Theirs was not a turn to one of the existing international orders, monastic or mendicant, but to a way of life (canons) that could still operate on its own, function locally, shape its own customary and seek out its own patrons, but with the legal and social standing of formal profession, of religion as such in medieval society. Despite connections to St. Victor and other houses of regular canons, rightly emphasized in earlier literature, the Devout never settled on a single text for guiding people into the religious life. In all their famous reading lists, from Master Geert’s own to the wonderful list prepared by the novice master at Leuven in 1526,9 a variety of texts are on offer to choose from: Cassian’s Collations, William’s Golden Epistle, David of Augsburg’s Profectus, Humbert’s com- mentary on the Rule, and so on. Even in formation, there was thus a measure of choice, no single prescribed text or texts, and they wrote customaries, in Latin or in the vernacular, house by house. They may have chosen from certain models, especially Carthusian, and may have eventually adopted fairly common practices. Still, especially among the Brothers and Sisters, even among the professed, we find individuals and households, in the light of tradition and reading, designing their own religious life, down to each hour of the day. To give some sense of what I mean by theirs as a “self-made” form of life, allow me to review some matters, well known to you, that constitute the texture of religious life, noting specially the role of women. At the heart of religious life, then and now, was prayer. But in the medieval church prayer also stood as the marker for certain estates, chiefly the clergy and professed religious, and became for them a matter of obligation: clerics had to say their hours in a collegiate church, the religious to gather in cloister at the prescribed hours throughout the day. Our private religious – beguines, pious individuals, or the

7 See my “Managing the Common Life: The Brothers at Deventer and the Codex of the Household (The Hague, MS KB 70 H 75),” in Schriftlichkeit und Lebenspraxis im Mittelalter, ed. Hagen Keller, Christel Meier and Thomas Scharff (Munich, 1999), pp. 111-69. 8 See now Theo Klausmann, Consuetudo consuetudine vincitur: Die Hausordunungen der Brüder vom gemeinsamen Leben im Bildungs- und Sozialisationsprogramm der Devotio moderna (Frankfurt 2003). 9 See now Thomas Kock, Die Buchkultur der Devotio moderna: Handschriftenproduktion, Literaturversorgung und Bibliotheksaufbau im Zeitalter des Medienwechsels (2nd e. Frankfurt 2003), pp. 122-53. NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 243

Devout – accepted this ideal, even desired it, but took it on in their own way and on their own terms, not as a matter of clerical obligation. They designed, or had designed, hours or prayers which worked for them, whether the little hours of the Virgin or the hours of Holy Wisdom or certain selections of Psalms. And they often prayed them in the vernacular, the women nearly always. It is these books, some in French around Liège, many more in Dutch and Low German, that we still find in such great numbers. No book from Devout circles was more widespread than Master Geert’s translation of the hours. While, it is true, books of Hours could also be fashion statements in the later middle ages, and were famously illustrated for wealthy patrons, the point here is to capture this sense of a personal prayer-life ordered by an individual, freely chosen and freely exercised. To be sure, as beguines or the Devout moved toward greater institutional shape, they also organized and regulated prayer life more along the lines of professed religious. But this arose as a matter of self-ordering, prayer-life as freely chosen and self-imposed, most evident in accounts of their lives as well as in their exercises and proposita. The sense of self-determining was never lost, always a driving impulse. The same applies to their modeling and teaching of religious life. Within a medieval religious order, typically, certain saints, often founder saints, got held up as exemplars along with selected writings fostered as foundational, Bernard’s for Cistercians or Bonaventure’s for Franciscans. But the beguines and the Devout made private choices: they had no set exemplars and could, in some sense, choose from all. Beguines often turned to the life of Marie d’Oignies or other local lives. The Devout, famously, told stories of their own, memorial lives of brothers and sisters written up by themselves, within their own houses, for their own edification. They became their own exemplars.10 Johan Busch noted this self-consciously, and found holy lives far more important than miracles or shrines in validating their movement.11 Of course the Devout read widely in other lives – they liked those of Francis or the ancient women (Catherine and Agnes). But they cultivated their own, people they knew and remembered and sought to emulate, alongside these venerable saints. More, the tales of their own were moveable, flexible texts, texts applied to their own edifying purposes. As we editors know, and sometimes groan about, almost no version is exactly like any other version. They were individualized to fit the religious needs of a person or house. The same holds for teachings about the nature of religious life. They read some of the most famous treatises: Cassian’s Collations, or William’s Golden Epistle, or Bonaventure’s Three-fold Way (this

10 I first pointed to this in “The Virtues, The Brothers, and the Schools: A Text from the Brothers of the Common Life,” Revue Bénédictine 98 (1988), pp. 178-217, where one of the Brothers took the vitae from the House in Deventer and excerpted from them to form a collection of examples for preaching and teaching–this done, I now think (contrary to my first interpretation), not at Emmerich, where the manuscript ended up, but at Deventer for the house of students there. 11 Busch, De viris illustribus 72 (the concluding chapter of that book), ed. Grube, Chronicon, pp. 222-26. See now Nikolaus Staubach, “Das Wunder der Devotio Moderna: Neue Aspekte im Werk des Windesheimer Geschichtsschreibers Johannes Busch,” in: Windesheim 1395-1995: Kloosters, Teksten, Invloeden (Nijmegen 1996), pp. 170-85. 244 JOHN VAN ENGEN emphasized by Sister Francis-Joseph). They also consciously sought to copy out the best of the Fathers, to emulate the early church. But what they put together was finally their own, not just Cassian or Bonaventure or Tauler, but a mix of teachings that spoke to their house or their soul, evident in the important new editions by Sister Francis-Joseph of Florens Radewijns and Gerhard Zerbolt of Zutphen.12 Beyond prayer, exemplarity, and teaching, though no less central to medieval religion, was penance. The Devout chose a penitential lifestyle, a way of abstinence and rigor and tears. But they designed their own way, one which can look dangerously extreme to us: fasting beyond all prudence, harshness in the treatment of their bodies beyond all sense, a self-critique of their vices or their conscience that looks relentless, overly scrupulous, even unmerciful. This they imposed upon themselves, or upon one another, much as the Desert Fathers had (another set of self-styled religious!) – though in the case of women it was reinforced by father-confessors from the same circle of Devout converts. Let me highlight here, as equally crucial for this lifestyle, the matter of correction and confession. While the Devout were prepared to observe the sacramental forms of the church, their personal drive toward “progress in the virtues,” as they said, meant that self-correction or steady correction of one another ordinarily proved far more important in practice. Sisters or Brothers are remembered in their lives, with approbation, for their readiness to speak out firmly when they saw something amiss, an act that drove a point home far more dramatically and personally (and painfully) than formal confession in secret to a priest. Whether in their writings about the vices and virtues, in their chastising of one another, or their constant self-examination, this form of correction was to inform the spirit of their households, and may even have functioned more centrally than sacramental confession as such. Crucial for all of this is the matter of language, not only the importance of reading and writing, but their willingness, even eagerness, to design and foster religious lives in their mother tongues. On this point so much has been said of late that I hardly need add anything.13 But it was precisely the daring of the beguines and the Devout – mostly for and partly by women – that enabled their mother tongue to become a fit instrument for religious teaching and expression. This act of writing was, again, in a sense, self-made; hence the difficulty, it seems to me, of some of their early texts. Two related observations may help reinforce that central point. The language was theirs, that of proverbial “sayings” and of exhortation. Even when the text is supposedly that of a father- confessor, say John Brinckerink, the “collations” exist as the Sisters took them

12 See now the important editorial work of Francis Joseph Legrand: Florens Radewijns, Petit manuel pour le dévot moderne, Tractatulus Devotus (Turnhout 1999), and Gerard Zerbolt de Zutphen, Manuel de la réforme intérieure, Tractatus devotus de reformacione virium anime (Turnhout 2001). 13 The starting-place is now: Nikoluas Staubach, “Gerhard Zerbolt von Zutphen und die Apologie der Laienlektüre in der Devotio moderna,” in: Laienlektüre und Buchmarket im späten Mittelalter, ed. Thomas Kock, Rita Schlusemann (Frankfurt 1997), pp. 221-90. NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 245 down and drew them up, more in the form of serial topics than a sustained argument.14 Further, texts moved easily between Latin and Middle Dutch, trans- lations going both ways, always with slight variations and amendments, each serving its own ends as the language of the heart and of understanding. This is clear in, say, the texts we have so early from Gerlach Peters – but in countless other cases as well. If, then, you have followed my broad argument thus far – a social and cultural landscape spread across the towns of the Low Countries, forms of religious life in those towns that were to varying degrees self-designed and locally regulated, and an important role within them for women and thus also for the vernacular tongue – allow me to introduce another broad theme. In my mind it makes up, alongside the self-styling, the second distinctive feature in this approach to religious life, our “second revolution.” I speak of their orientation to the end of religious life, to an experience of God and divine presence. What emerges from these texts and their teachings suggests, virtually, a contradiction, really a paradox. Over against all this self-making and self-designing of the religious life, over against, socially speaking, all this local regulating, all this involvement in local charities and devotions, some of the New Devout, at least to hear their teachers and their critics, aimed finally to leave it all behind, to achieve, put most paradoxically, a state of emptiness or spiritual nakedness. Of course it was not achieved, that is, not humanly achieved. Their entrance into the presence of God came rather as something transcendant, a moment of grace, made possible by a total openness to the divine. The “self-designing,” the careful cultivation of will and love, may prepare a person to receive the divine; but sometimes the “cultivating” must be left behind in order to open into the divine – one distinction, perhaps, between forms found acceptable (Ruusbroec) and suspect (Marguerite Porete). Ruusbroec found this approach to divine union false, a turn to the emptiness deep within rather than to the luminous abyss of God. But he found it a major threat, an arrogant approach to religion which he took up again and again.15 Allow me to explore it here first by way of Marguerite Porete and those who might be called her fellow-travelers, even in some extended way, Jan Ruusbroec. Theirs was a vision of religious perfection and an experience of union that placed it beyond all this striving, all this self- making. The human spirit transcended, or rather had to empty the very self, as Marguerite put it, and finally, in its extreme expression, was stripped even of

14 A point made eloquently by Thom Mertens, “Postuum auteurschap: De collaties van Johannes Brinckerinck,” in Windesheim 1393-1995 (n. 11 above), pp. 85-97. About proverbial sayings, see my “The Sayings of the Fathers: An Inside Look at the New Devout in Deventer,” in: Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History. Essays Presented to Heiko A. Oberman on his 70th Birthday, ed. Robert J. Bast and Andrew Colin Gow (Leiden 2000), pp. 279-302, with “A Working Edition of the Dicta patrum,” pp. 303-20. 15 Even in the summary apology for his own contested views, his Boecsken der verclaringhe, ed. G. de Baere (Leiden 1981), pp. 115-21, he devotes considerable space to setting out these false views, in some sense as the context, or point of departure, for his own understanding of mystical union with a Triune God. 246 JOHN VAN ENGEN activity, of progress in virtue, participation in the sacraments, of focusing the will and cultivating love; so the perfected soul is free to fall naked and empty into God himself. This is how Marguerite put it: “she has fallen from grace into the perfection of the work of the Virtues, and from the Virtues into Love, and from Love into Nothingness, and from Nothingness into the Illumining of God, who regards himself with eyes of his majesty, and who in this has illumined her with himself. And she is so wholly dissolved into him that she sees neither herself nor him.”16 Such a soul’s will, Marguerite claims, has in reality no will of her own. These souls live in total freedom, are entirely ennobled, have entered into a state of enjoying full liberty in God. Such souls, she further claims, truly make up “Holy Church,” not just the church of the clergy, or of routine parish observances, or even, we might add, that of beguine households. The church is comprised of those who, after all this intensity and striving, have, so to speak, relaxed into God, opened themselves wholly and nakedly to the divine presence. “It is, she says, a very long journey from the land of the Virtues, which the forlorn possess, to the land of the Forgotten and Naked and Brought to Nothing or the Illumined, who are in that higher state of being where God is, abandoned by himself in himself.” Such souls must have moved beyond the cultivating of the affections: “those who love are deceived by the tenderness of their affection, which prevents them from ever coming to true knowledge. And so like children they remain occup- ied in childish works.” Indeed for any who have finally risen above or sunk below all such preoccupations (both metaphors work for her), “such a soul has attained to the greatest perfection of life, and has come nearer to the Far-Near, when Holy Church can take no example whatever from her life.”17. Even exemplarity, that for which the devout strived among themselves on the model of the saints, if it became an end, would block union, would hold out a mirage or false goal. My point, without entering into all the subtleties and difficulties of Marguerite’s teaching, is simply this. Views such as these make sense only as a reaction to, a radical thinking through and beyond, the spiritual climate fostered in self-made communities: the constant emphasis upon growth in virtue and ascesis, upon preparing for and taking in the sacraments, intensifying love, shaping the will, making one’s life a perfect example in the world and the church. For Marguerite, and those who were like-minded (swept up in the charge of Free Spirit heretics), the perfected souls had rather, in the end, to empty themselves and pass through all such things to a naked and illumined Love, a simple unspeakable dissolving into a God beyond naming, beyond manipulating. To understand her difficult book, Marguerite de Porete declared in the poem that introduced her writings, those whose “treasure” lay in their

16 Marguerite, The Mirror of Simple Souls c. 91. I have followed the translation of Edmund Colledge, J.C. Marler, and Judith Grant (Notre Dame 1999), p. 116, but compared the edition of P. Verdeyen, Margarete Porete Speculum simplicium animarum (Corpus Christianorum 69, 1986), pp. 256-59. 17 Ibid. cc. 95, 133, 134, ed. Verdeyen, pp. 264, 392-95. NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 247 scientia, all the theologians and other clerics, would have to proceed humbly, putting their confidence rather in those gifted with Love and illumined with Faith – thereby asserting a conscious reversal of the call to entrust one’s self to those gifted with knowledge through study, this, ironically, a very knowing reversal.18 Marguerite signaled emphatically a key feature in the second revolution: a turn away from the active life of learning and pastoring, maybe even of charity, a radical turn back to the contemplative life. Earlier that life had been reserved mostly for those in cloisters. Now it was, in effect, open to all. Access to it, paradoxically, was in some sense self-designed, and yet practitioners had to pass beyond self-designing into a totally abandoned experience of God. In that era, nearly all agreed, the Carthusians proved the most magnificent and successful exemplars, in hermitages strategically located on the edges of towns, fostering this life through writing as well as through spreading books.19 Jan Ruusbroec proved himself an eloquent and sophisticated exponent, in his vernacular, himself in some sense a self-made teacher. He fully understood, at some basic level, what Marguerite was about, and partially agreed, thus in his late book on the beguines: alle die goede menschen die verlicht zijn met der gracien gods, in haren inkeere boven redene in haer eyghen wesen, daer vinden sy dat rijcke gods in hen ende gode in zyn rijcke. Ende dit heet een scouwende leven, dat ons vanden gheeste ons heren gheeyscht ende gheraden es [“all the good people who are illumined with the grace of God, in their turning- inward above reason, into their own being, there find the kingdom of God within them and God in his kingdom. And this is called a contemplative life, which is asked of us by the spirit of our Lord, and counseled.”] To be sure, Ruusbroec had no place for any who belittled the active life, even if he himself spoke of it sometimes as a first stage. It remained essential, also for contemplatives, and he critiqued those who settled merely for an emptied emptiness within, as he put it: Maer si venden haer eyghen wesen: eene onghe- beelde ghestilde ledicheit, ende daer dunct hem dat zy eewich zalich zijn [“But they find there their own being, an imageless, stilled emptiness, and there they imagine they are eternally blessed”]. Several of these types, in his experience, even if they continued to participate in the virtues and the sacraments, indulged in an overweening spiritual pride as well, and imagined themselves quit of seeking God, quit of the virtues. This extended to imagining themselves as virtually God himself. In the elevation of Christ at the resurrection and his body at the altar, they saw symbolized their rising to a higher contemplative

18 Her prefatory poem, p. 8. 19 Despite a growing and fine literature on the late medieval Carthusians, this social-religious dimension has not received adequate study. I tried to point toward it in my little introduction to Dennis Martin’s Carthusian Spirituality: The Writings of Hugh of Balma and Guigo de Ponte (New York 1997), pp. xv-xx (and there only about relatively early texts, and in Latin, unlike the phenomenal expansion a century later). 248 JOHN VAN ENGEN life, and understood it as transcending human life. This they imagined for themselves, saw themselves as conjoined to the flesh and blood, in the rising. Ruusbroec was indignant: soe dunct u dat ghi dat selve sijt. Ende hier omme en hebdi noch lost noch werdicheit ten lichame ons heeren, noch dat heilige sacrament te siene [“so you think that you are the very same yourself. And so you also have no desire or reverence for the body of the Lord, nor to gaze on the holy sacrament”].20 But even if he vigorously critiqued its radical expres- sions, and insisted on a life of moral virtue and sacramental participation, he understood and himself fostered the marked turn toward contemplative union. All these startling reversals make sense, in my view, if we hold as true and in tension two elements as characterizing this second revolution in the understanding of religious life. First, that it was self-made, therefore highly inven- tive but also ever striving, ever seeking out more intense forms of expression, in austerity, in penance, in sacramental devotion, in breaking and re-forming the will, in kindling the affections of love. And, second, that it aimed finally, despite all the activity, all the striving, toward a contemplative life, a unitive experience of the divine. And so some thinkers, best represented in their different ways by Marguerite and by Jan Ruusbroec, taught a self that strived to move through all the striving, to empty into God, relax, as it were, nakedly into the divine, Marguerite presenting this in basically human and supra-human forms, often difficult to follow in their dense expression, Ruusbroec insisting upon the role of a divine coming (grace) and of human loving acts, also dense often in its expression. Beyond personal distinctions in thought and experience and understanding, might we see in this, in any way, possible differences between a priest and a self-taught layperson, a man and a woman?

PRIVATE RELIGION: THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS

The Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life lived out their religious lives in an uncertain shadowland between saeculum, the world of lay people, and monasterium, the world of the cloister and the professed. They lived in households on ordinary city streets among the people, walked with them to church and to market, maintained cordial relations with family and friends; and yet lived a life apart in religious practice, in dress, and in social structure. They joined a community neither lay nor religious, where they lived together in a corporate household as a private societas. They remained bound to one another, so they protested, neither out of the self-interest ascribed to lay people, nor the obedience required of religious, but solely out of the fear and love of God. In social and religious practice, people who pursued a form of life located some- where between the vows of marriage and the vows of religion, refusing to take vows themselves and yet calling themselves religious, invited scorn, mistrust,

20 Jan van Ruusbroec, Vanden XII Beghinen, ed. M.M. Kors (Opera Omnia 7A: Corpus Christiano- rum Continuatio Mediaevalis 107A; Turnhout 2000), pp. 87, 89, 93, 109. NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 249 and critique from both sides. They meant to sustain a lifestyle which Kaspar Elm has called “semi-religious.” I have discussed them as “private religious.”21 They had no easy time of it, especially after the attacks on beguines. No citizen of fourteenth-century Deventer has left a letter or memoire disclosing how townspeople looked upon the New Devout. But one citizen reportedly told Master Geert to quit carrying on like this, to “let people go down to hell in peace.”22 In the mid-1430s, the son of a distinguished local family, Egbert ter Beek, adopted the dress and demeanor of the Brothers of the Common Life while at school in Deventer. In the streets of this market town no one could mistake his stance. One story, told years later, had him walking through the city square with guarded eyes bearing a plate. When he encountered a female relative, and failed to see or greet her, she knocked the plate out of his hand and snapped, “What for a Lollard is this who walks around in this way?” He bore her insult without remark, picked up his plate, and continued on his way. Here was a teenage student, not cloistered in a monastic house and yet not of this world – a “Lollard” in his relative’s eyes, a likely heretic to some, a self- appointed ascetic to others. His father subsequently tried every argument he knew to talk his son out of joining the Brotherhood.23 But other laypeople, including a noblewoman and members of the city magistrate, offered support, though the alderman who aided them most got nicknamed the “pope of the heretics.” The Devout entered upon their way of life aware of these tensions. When Master Geert turned his parents’ house into a hospice for women in 1374, he stipulated, in 1379 at the latest, that they would make up no new religious order and should remain under civic jurisdiction. In the 1380s and 1390s the Devout established a regular branch, the canons and canonesses, in part as a defensive shield to proclaim their legitimacy. The earliest Sisters, to judge from the legal defenses mounted on their behalf, were accused of having made bold steps toward community formation outside religious orders. A Dominican inquisitor named Friar Eylard conducted an investigation of households at Utrecht and Rhenen in the 1390s. On the strength of sworn testimony, he listed fifteen suspect practices. He objected to the aut- horitative control of the “Martha” over all sisters, extending to most aspects of their lives. This blocked them, he claimed, from interaction with others who

21 An argument Elm has developed through a lifetime of work and presented in a rich article: “Vita regularis sine regula: Bedeutung, Rechtsstellung und Selbstverständnis des mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Semireligiosentums,” in: Häresie und vorzeitige Reformation im Spätmittelalter, ed. Frantisek Smahel (Munich 1998), pp. 239-73; and applied to the New Devout in “Die Bruderschaft vom Gemeinsamen Leben: eine geistliche Lebensform zwischen Kloster und Welt, Mittelalter und Neuzeit,” in: Ons geestelijk erf 59, 1985, pp. 470-96. For the status of the Sisters, see Gerhard Rehm, Die Schwestern vom gemeinsamen Leben im nordwestlichen Deutschland (Berliner Historische Studien 11), Berlin 1985, pp. 148-89. I have addressed this same issue in: “Friar Johannes Nyder on Laypeople Living as Religious in the World,” in: Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Kaspar Elm zum 70. Geburtstag (Berlin, 1999), pp. 583-615. 22 Thomas of Kempen, Chronicon monte sanctae agnetis, ed. M.J. Pohl, Opera Omnia (Freiburg 1922), VII, p. 337. 23 Vita Egberti, ed. Gerhardus Dumbar, Analecta, pp. 162-65. 250 JOHN VAN ENGEN might persuade them to adopt a different form of the religious life. He objected as well to a practice whereby Sisters reportedly confessed to this Martha first, before they left the house to confess to their parish priest. Lay women also confessed to this Martha at times, it was said, and the father-confessor associated with the movement sometimes directed laywomen to her instead of to himself, an infringement on parochial sacramental rights. A head “Martha” in Utrecht, moreover, “visited” other houses, and expected full confessions from sisters about the quality of religious life, a blatant imitation of religious orders. Worse, the Sisters deliberately attempted to hide their usages from others, it was charged, partly on grounds that priests outside their group were not holy or learned enough to advise them.24 To sustain a communal form of life outside corporate orders, the early Brothers, for their part, devised ingenious joint-holding societies whereby three or four individuals (prouisores) managed a common income on behalf of “inwardly-directed” women or men. The earliest documented of these funds, in 1383, was supervised by a townsman, a cleric, a priest, and Geert Grote, himself a deacon and a townsman. The men in Deventer secured a property and house early in 1391 by trade, and city magistrates freed the Devout from watch and neighborhood duties, specified “payments” still due the city, claimed a right of intervention if the household gained a bad reputation or had difficulty appointing new managers, and added two of their own number to the three priests charged with oversight. The noble woman who made this possible, and the city magistrates themselves (ende wy mede), specified that the house’s inhabitants should always be of outstanding character, prepared to serve God and offer religious aid, as exemplars in the city, inwardly directed priests and clerics.25 In the later middle ages generally, town magistrates feared the alie- nation of wealth and jurisdiction to churchmen. Canons and learned clerics also looked askance at instruction offered to lay people in the vernacular, while parish priests jealously guarded their rights to confession and burial, and mendicant orders warily fended off new or rival religious orders in the city. The Devout had already proved provocative enough. In 1383 Geert Grote, preaching to the clergy gathered in synod at Utrecht, had denounced parish priests as corrupt, as tainted by money and sex. The Devout also distrusted any religious house not recently reformed (Observant) or Carthusian. Little wonder that churchmen were cautious about these new households. When the Dominican inquisitor turned against them, the Devout responded with every legal means available. This is a complicated story, and its main figure was Brother Gerhard Zerbolt of Zutphen who completed a 100-page legal defense before his untimely death of plague in 1398. He envisioned a way of

24 We have two reports of this inquisition, reproduced in Paul Fredericq, Corpus documentorum inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae II (Ghent 1896), pp. 153-56, 179-85. I have under- taken a new edition of both from the manuscripts. 25 For the document, see C. van der Wansem, Het onstaan en de geschiedenis der Broederschap van het Gemene Leven tot 1400 (Leuven 1958), pp. 183-87. On matters of early organization, see my “Managing the Common Life (n. 7 above). NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 251 being religious without professing religion. Most studies emphasize the spiritual re-orientation of the Devout, their desire to return to the community of the early church as envisioned by Cassian, the Desert Fathers, Jerome, and Augustine. But to give this vision practical form required an even greater legal and social re-orientation, to imagine ordered, communal religious households outside orders. For this Gerhard (and the canon lawyers he worked with) turned to the language of a private “society,” introduced into church law from Roman law. Societies had the right to organize; what better than a society whose purpose was devotion? Societies could manage their own goods; how better to handle them than on the communal model of the early church and natural reason? Household societies could establish internal customs; what better than a like-minded household of devout people acting together? Christians could admonish, teach, counsel, and correct one another; how better than in a household society that facilitated such action as voluntary works of charity and in the people’s own language? All the obligatory structures of the church and the orders, so the Devout protested, remained untouched and unchallenged. So too the whole lay world continued in its earthly business. But their communal household, a private society based on mutual charity and material commonal- ity, would pursue its religious ends “inbetween” the social and legal spaces left by the civic and ecclesiastical worlds: A household organized as religious, with garb neither lay nor religious but “middling” in appearance, with a language that mediated spiritual and lay concerns. This, Gerhard argued against suspicious friar-inquisitors and jealous secular rectors, was possible and permis- sible, even meritorious.26 An unpublished apologia for the Devout, first discovered by Kaspar Elm, reveals additional suspicions and charges. In this Satisfactio nostra, as I title it, the charges reveal, almost colloquially, the kind of tensions that persisted down to the 1470s at least, despite the foundation of Windesheim in 1386/87, epis- copal approval in 1401, approbation at the Council of Constance in 1417, and papal approval in the 1430s. Three sorts of people, in the author’s view, falsely accused the Devout: The simple and ignorant who assumed this way of life must be wrong because it was out of step with ordinary Christians, as well the learned and professed who scorned it without bothering to look into it, and then all those worldly people who simply opposed any devotion and worship. The Devout, he asserted, kept the true and original “Christian religion,” here deploying a kind of wordplay on the term religio. This argument went back at least to Jean Gerson and the Council of Constance: “The Christian religion, which is prior to and greater than all other religiones / religious orders, is the most approved one, since it was instituted and approved by Christ the highest legislator and kept since then by the faithful.”27

26 This is a brief summary of my article, “Devout Communities and Inquisitorial Orders: The Legal Defense of the New Devout,” in: Kirchenreform von unten: Gerhard Zerbolt von Zutphen und die Brüder vom Gemeinsamen Leben, ed. Nikolaus Staubach (Frankfurt, 2003), pp. 44-101. 27 This little treatise, of which I have an edition in preparation, is found in Emmerich, Stadtbibliothek, MS 13. 252 JOHN VAN ENGEN

Objections were raised mostly, it seems, against various concrete practices among the Devout. Critics were offended by the Devout wearing a sort of self- adopted habit. They also charged them with taking pride in their uprightness, trying to set themselves off from the ordinary secular clergy. So too their emphatic insistence upon a common life: it effectively disparaged the honest priest who lived from his benefice and provided for necessities at his own hearth. But, our Devout apologist retorted, relations with local parish priests were generally good; indeed many chose to make their confessions to these priest-Brothers. Even more annoying, critics said, was their invocation of the early church: this was to claim for themselves its hallowed sanctity. The Devout were also appropriating much of the apparatus of worship and preaching (in the form of their collations), including vernacular teaching. Some accused them of reproducing the Bohemian heresy (that is, being Hussite). Some saw these self- formed communities as nothing but conventicles, dangerous sect-like opera- tions operating beyond the arm of the church. Our apologist answers that their houses stood open at all times for either clergy or laypeople to walk in and see what was going on – this a detail that appears nowhere else, disclosing how porous the communities were, no cloister wall or gate to bar the intrusions of the world. Towards the end this apologist took up that for which the Brothers had become best known, their care of teenage students. Many bright young student- clerics were drawn into the orbit of these Devout households during their ado- lescent years, and later sent on their way to become leaders in a variety of Observant or reformed houses. The women’s houses, too, despite a bar on formal schooling, drew in many young girls, and prepared them for religious life. Citizens and parents expressed deep displeasure. Bright sons were diverted from promising clerical careers, young girls subjected to an austere regime of bodily and spiritual discipline. But the author of our Satisfactio, pointing to restored and reformed religious houses throughout the region, presented this religious training of youth as a self-conscious pastoral strategy for winning souls. The plan was simple: to mix with students, address them about their work and life’s way, draw them into disciplined communities, then form their minds and spirits before, as the Devout saw it, the “world” had hardened them beyond hope.

PRIVATE RELIGION AMONG THE CANONS AND CANONESSES

This tells us a good deal about the Brothers and Sisters and their way of life, you may object, but what about the professed canons and canonesses who spread across the Lowlands, especially in the south? How could a “second revolution” in the understanding of religious life apply to those taking vows? Let me put it very simply. I think the spirit of the Devout, of living between the world and the cloister, permeated the entire movement, even its professed forms, and thereby fostered a form of spiritual teaching that others could take over for themselves, whether inside or beyond the religious life, even lay people. NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 253

This sense of the religious life as lived on the edge, inbetween, not just in the safety of the cloister, persisted. For the Devout, however, unlike the mendicants, the goal was not primarily pastoral or charitable, whatever the extent of those activities. They sought the contemplative life, union with God, however fleeting, whatever their personal circumstances. Allow me to follow these impulses into the lives and teachings of two figures, a woman and a man, one controversial in her own time and forgotten until very recently, Alijt Bake, the second amazingly influential in his own time and down virtually into ours, Thomas of Kempen. Elsewhere, I have presented the case of Gerlach Peters, one of the truly remarkable spiritual writers of the first generation, a writer in both Dutch and Latin, who lived this inbetween life even as a professed canon.28 Others have presented other writers, especially Thom Mertens’s study of Henrick Mande.29 Here I will make my point by way of Thomas, the most approved of Windesheim authors, and Alijt Bake, whom the General Chapter apparently shut down, perhaps thereby hastening her untimely death. Many of you know the story and perhaps some works of Alijt Bake, though she is still an author nearly unknown outside students of Middle Dutch and the Devout.30 Born in 1415, she first explored religious life privately around Utrecht, with the aide of a recluse and a hospice-sister. Still a lay person, she tried out religious life with the newly-founded canonesses in Ghent, their leader one of the vete- rans of Diepenveen in its founding days. But she was sorely tempted to return to Utrecht, or alternatively to join the reformed Clares under Colette, also then resident in Ghent. All this took place in her early 20s. After extraordinary experiences in 1440/41, a divine intervention or revelation, as she grasped it, she resolved to make profession as a canoness among the Devout. Not long after, despite or even owing to her fierce criticism of the existing regime as unsatis- factory, she was named prioress herself in 1445, and then, ten years later in 1455, summarily removed and banished, to die shortly afterwards at forty years of age. Scholars are still sorting out her works and editing her texts, still seeking out the sources of her thought (especially Tauler, but also Ruusbroec and Jan van Leeuwen), still interpreting the meaning of her teaching. I would like to point toward the two themes which have shaped these lectures, the importance of a self-made religious life betwixt and between, and a return to contemplative life, the search for union.

28 “The Work of Gerlach Peters (d. 1411), Spiritual Diarist and Letter-Writer, a Mystic among the Devout,” Ons geestelijk erf 73 (1999), pp. 150-77. 29 Thom Mertens, Hendrik Mande (?-1431): teksthistorische en literairhistorische studies (Nij- megen 1986). 30 Wybren Scheepsma, Deemoed en devotie: De koorvrouwen van Windesheim en hun geschrif- ten (Amsterdam 1997), pp. 175-202, 252-64; R. van Dijk, Alijt Bake: Tot in de peilloze diepte van God (Kampen 1997). See also Anne Bollmann, “Een vrauwe te sijn op mijn selfs handt: Alijt Bake (1415-†1455) als geistliche Reformerin des innerlichen Lebens,” Ons geestelijk erf 76 (2002), pp. 64-98. An English translation: “‘Being a Woman on my Own’: Alijt Bake (1415-1455) as Reformer of the Inner Self,” in: Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval Europe 1200-1550, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (Turnhout 2004), pp. 67-96. 254 JOHN VAN ENGEN

Without denying the importance and originality of her mystical writings, especially the quietist self-emptying which provoked her critics, I would like to focus your attention on several striking features in her story and her teaching, reviewed here more or less in her own words. She was engaged, on her own and in a very self-conscious way, in a quest for the perfect religious life. When she pursued religion in the world as a lay person in Utrecht, exploring the contemplative life with a recluse and the charitable life with a hospice-sister, she suffered much “tribulation,” to use her own word – its exact nature, alas, unknown to us, since her account of it in a “little book,” one part of her so-called autobiography, has gone missing. At Ghent the cloistered life in a new house of canonesses, led by an aging founder of the Devout movement (Hille Sonderlands), also did not satisfy. It only sharpened her critique of religious practice and deepened her personal spiritual crisis. Even profession would not end it, but opened her out to more crises and deeper exploration. Even her subsequent role as leader and teacher within her own community, we know, though only approximately, would not end it. It only precipitated what became the final crisis. She discovered, and discovered the hard way, that no form of life would in itself satisfy her quest. She stated this dramatically towards the end of her best-known and most comprehensive teaching tractate, De Vier Kruiswegen [“The Four Ways of the Cross”]: Och, Heere God, nu en was ic noyt zoe mistroest. Want doen ic in die werelt was, doen hadde ic noch eenighen [= troest?] ende hoepe, als ic uuyt der werelt wesen soude, dat ic dan mijn leven beteren soude. Maer nu en hebbe ic gheenen [= troest?] oft hoepe, want ic en weet niet stede oft plaetse oft gheen dinc, dat my helpen mach [tot eenen goeden eynde] dan God alleene. [“Oh Lord, now was I never so without solace. Because when I was in the world, then I had still some (solace, or: some people?) and hope that if I should leave the world I could improve my life. But now I have no (solace, or: no one) because I know no status or place or thing that can help me (to a good end) other than God alone”].31 Perhaps, you might say, this is the point at which every earnest religious seeker arrives, to realize there is no hope but God, no other person, no form of life as such. But Alijt Bake came to this realization by way of living a constant state of tension, ever pushing onwards, ever testing new forms of life,

31 B.J. Spaapen, “Middeleeuwse pasiemystiek II,” Ons geestelijk erf 40 (1966) p. 59. Scholars now agree that MS B is likely from Bake’s own hand. Spaapen chose against that manuscript, and placed its readings in the apparatus. It is possible to argue that both versions come ultimately from Alijt Bake, the first a rough draft, the second a more finished text, or the second revised in the light of criticism (since it generally softens potentially difficult matters). This is still to be worked out by scholars. I hope to say something about it in a future translation of Bake’s work into English, which I now have underway. In this case the difference is not so much one of teaching as of human claim: that, while still in the world, she had some sympathetic people around her, or had some solace / comfort (troest here is likely consolation, that word so common in late medieval devotional texts, so important, so hard to translate in its full force into modern English). NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 255 relentlessly driving her towards a wrenching turn inwards. She came to see, in retrospect, the Devil himself at work in her life’s struggle, first tempting her to stay in the world in some form, then to return to the world after trying cloistered life and finding it disappointing. She came to view as equally demonic the widespread impulse to adopt an especially austere regimen of cloistered life, whether as a Devout canoness or as an Observant Clare. To find God she had to stand over and against, apart from, all this. Further, the more she turned inward, toward, as she saw it, true interior poverty, true nakedness before God in desire, the more she ended up squarely in the world, that is, in the oppres- sive world of her sinful self. Her fellow sisters saw this restless striving, this constant pushing to the edge, and were convinced it stemmed from pride. It could only come to a bad end, they told her, as she reports it at the outset of her “autobiography”: They feared that I wanted to fly all too high, wanted perfection all too quickly, and so would be deceived. They counseled me strongly against this way and, as best they could, put me off from it, saying that I should turn toward getting to know my faults and overcoming them and toward useful acts of external service. This is what was proper to the young and inexperienced, not these high things. They spoke to me frequently and a great deal, and they scorned me and my words and acts, and disparaged them. And because I could turn to the things they set out only with difficulty, they became displeased with me and dissatisfied, because I was so drawn inwards to the things that God was teaching me from within. They condemned me as eighenwijs and thinking well of my self, believing my self and feelings better than anyone else’s, thus stuck in my self and living in my self, in short, nothing other than a woman who had taken herself into her own hands [een vrauwe te sijn op mijn selfs handt]. Things of this sort they said often.32 The term eighenwijs (“wise in her own eyes”) – a colloquial term, powerful still in Dutch, though not easy to convey fully in English – had meaning as well in the context of contemporary religious controversy, as she and they must have known. Ruusbroec alludes to it, less colloquially, when he sums up the trouble with these self-appointed spiritual seekers: Si sijn eighens willen end niemene onderdaen, ende dat achten si geestleke vrieheit [“They are self-willed (lite- rally: of their own will) and subject to no one, and this they regard as spiritual liberty.”]33 The Sisters also thought, notably, that she read too much, and that this would ruin her. She consistently claimed, however scholars may judge it, that the reading was not at issue or the source of her trouble, not what engaged her. What drove her was a sense of working out her interior life as best she could, all the while engaged an interior dialogue with Christ. Indeed, she tells us, the Lord saw her “good and simple intentions and desires,” her struggle and her despair, and finally came to her aid.

32 My translation from: B. J. Spaapen, “Middeleeuwse passiemystiek III,” Ons geestelijk erf 41 (1967), pp. 220-21. 33 Ruusbroec, Boecsken der verclaeringe, ed. De Baere, p. 119. 256 JOHN VAN ENGEN

At the level of practice and community, as you know, Alijt Bake found her cloistered life wanting. She was harshly critical of her seniors, women who had acted as leaders in forming the Devout life. In her view, they were entirely con- sumed by external matters, did not understand her or her quest for a deeper interior life. And for that reason Coleta’s reformed Clares also represented the false way, a temptation of the Devil, an opportunity to lose one’s self even more fully in outer observances. What came clear to her in the crisis of her spiritual turmoil and through the extraordinary experiences of 1440/41 would point a different way, even if it also confirmed that she should stay in Ghent and make profession as a canoness. She was to become a nun within before she became one without: Voirt soo plach ick onsen Heere to bidden altoos dat Hij mij nonne maken wilde van binnen, eer ick nonne worde van buijten [“And so from then on I used to pray to our Lord thus, that he would make me a nun from within before I became a nun outwardly”].34 The key word here is “before.” It was not a question of taking the habit or making profession, though she settled upon doing so. It was a question of becoming a religious within, first, on her own. So too with respect to finding the right place for pursuing a reformed religious life. It was not a question of which house or reformed order to choose, but of her reforming herself within, re-making her interior. All the rigor and reform that Colette brought to external observance, as Alijt saw it, she would herself now bring to the internal life. God had opened her eyes and showed her how she was to walk, how she was to obtain the high and hidden life, to live as interior reform all that Colette brought to the reform of observances – all this while staying within the same house, without any apparent external change. None of her companions, she says, understood this, indeed had any idea of what was going on inside her. But there was even more to her experience and to her claim. All this, she believed, came to her from God, was revealed to her, and so she was now to teach and preach: Och, daer soo openbaerde mij eerst desen nieuwen wech der salicheijt, die ick predicken ende leeren, daer ick doen in overghesedt was van mij selven in God, met kennissen ende met minnen, maer daernaer soo moeste in mij ghevest wor- den met laeten ende met lijden, daer ick sient dien tijt in ghewandelt hebbe [“Oh, thus he then and there first revealed to me this new way of blessedness / salvation, which I preach and teach, whereby I was transformed from my self into God with knowledge and with love, but which afterwards had to be confirmed in me with resignation and suffering, the way in which I have walked since that time.”]35 This was the way she now walked, but also taught and preached, whatever others might think, thereby releasing her own self into love and suffering. On looking back and choosing to write it all up for her sisters – this, it must be

34 Spaapen (n. 32 above), p. 248. 35 Ibid, p. 244-45. NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 257 presumed, a quite deliberate act –, she turned her extended spiritual crisis into the story of her finding a new way, or rather God finding her in his revelation of a new way. As interpreters we may take up various dimensions of this fascinating author, her complex mystical teachings, her decision to write, her projection of herself into the teaching, her sense of revelation. But we should not lose sight of the basics: Her crises were set off by wondering what form of spiritual life to pursue, whether inside or outside a cloister, in which house or place or order. The end, she learned, was not to find the perfect house. The end was to find God revealed deep within, and to live in tension with every house or place, even a rigorous house of Devout canonesses – or maybe especially there, where the temptation was precisely to lose one’s religious self in con- tentment with reformed external observances. For this, she says, she required a strength and freedom that was “manly,” as she put it; an interior dialogue with Christ on the way of the cross, of death and dying and self-emptying. All this said, and as independent as Alijt Bake first appears, as a human figure and as a spiritual teacher and female writer, we would do well, I think, not to set her in some wholly apart category – as trouble with her sisters and then with the Windesheim priors finally did. We would do better to see embodied in her, with unusual clarity, the spirit of this ‘second revolution’, this fresh attempt to grasp and live the perfect religious life, this living on the edge, betwixt and between, driving a person back on their interior resources and on God. This is the spirit of the New Devout. Here, quite ironically, it finds itself at odds with newly institutionalized forms of the Devout movement. Whatever the qualities of her teaching and her writing, her historical importance lies, among other things, in her marvelous expression of this dynamic, powerful among the New Devout into its second or third generation, also among women, even turned against its own institutional forms. But what of the second trait in this revolution, a return to forms of contemplative life? Alijt Bake was at times, as she said, nearly crazy with love and desire for her Lord. Yet she came to understand the fourth and highest way toward the cross as not possible apart from abandoning that self and all its desires. Some of you know her signature emphasis: laten en lijden en minnen. In resignation, in suffering, and in love, seekers had to transcend, go beyond, leave behind, all they strenuously cultivated in the external exercises of a self- made religious life, including the will, the desire, the tasting: Want desen wech en leyt niet opwaert in oefeninghen van lichten ende van sma- ken ende ghebruyken, mer [hy leyt] neder wert in laten ende in lijden [ende] van puerder [rechten] minnen ter [ewiger] eeren Gods [ende tot sijnen love]. [“Because this way (her new or highest way) does not lead upwards in exercises involving illumining and tasting and enjoying, but (it leads) downwards in resignation and suffering and pure (right) love to the (everlasting) honor of God (and to his praise)”].36

36 Spaapen (n. 31 above), p. 33. 258 JOHN VAN ENGEN

This required a naked self, and that came with a sense of abandonment, even of being without solace (troest). When she sinks into this state she hardly knows anymore what to confess, how or why to be contrite, what spiritual affections to cultivate; any ordinary or cultivated sense of the religious life now seems totally a loss. For, truly to be converted, to enter upon the fullness of the four ways toward the cross, a person must lose all self-possession, all eighenschap. Only then could there follow any possible union of nature to nature, of spirit to spirit, as she puts it, thus “wort hy overgheformt in Gode, alsoe nae als hy emmermeer [daer in] mach comen [“transformed into God, as nearly as a person may ever come (therein)”]. But indeed a person may be transformed, so much so, as she puts it, dat daer by nae gheen onderscheit en is tusschen den gheest Gods ende den geest des menschen [sijnen geest], anders dan deen geest onghe- scapen is ende dander ghescapen [“that there is nearly no difference between the spirit of God and the spirit of the person (his spirit), other than that the one spirit is uncreated and the other is created.”]37 Here she seems both to echo and to push past Ruusbroec-like teachings. Plainly, the bijnahe (“nearly”), along with her distinction between created and uncreated beings, served, technically, to save her from heresy. But she imagined, or herself experienced, a union that was nearly complete, and came only after a self-possessed self gave up all seeking and decision-making, became entirely naked to God’s own working. She experienced God as a “voice without words” (stemme sonder wordt uut Gode gheboren in den geeste des menschen), but also as creating in her a state of being that was simple and sweet, full of rest and peace, drawing her person ever deeper into laten en lijden en minnen tot God. My point is not to explore all the dimensions of Alijt Bake’s mystical teaching, its possible sources, its flirting with orthodoxy in a hostile climate, even her restless personality. My point is to draw into a larger historical pic- ture the understanding of the contemplative life at which she arrived. She insists, notably, that, though this striving for union requires a life apart and an emptying out of all self-possession, all eighenschap, it is nonetheless open to all, indeed is meant to be preached to all, not just to professed religious or the cloistered. Her strongest desire is to convert all her fellow Christians, even to offer herself up time and again voor alle die ghemein kersten menschen [“all the common Christian people”], as she puts it. When Christ speaks to her, he assures her that he will do for each what he has done for her if they will but convert to him – a teaching not universalist exactly but comparable in some ways to questions like those that troubled Julian of Norwich. This is, in Bake’s teaching, available, however, only to those who have entirely converted within, have entirely emptied themselves, whatever their external form of life. And, to be clear, she also thought that most “common Christians” would not grasp or act upon this message. This produces, in my view, a powerful and unresolved tension, itself one of the features of this second revolution. Here is an understanding of the perfect life as constantly being self-made and re-made, an immense striving, yet achieving

37 Spaapen (n. 31 above), pp. 54-55 NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 259 its end only if there is finally a total emptying out of the self and all its striving; a way of life that is ever on edge, not at home even in the cloister; one that presumes the exercises of the religious life, and claims to know a “nearly indistinguishable” union with God. This is a highly fruitful and deeply unsettling mix, part of the personal tragedy in Alijt’s life. This vision of Christian perfection did not involve settling into cloistered life or indeed lay life, but a constant striving towards taking possession of the self, very deliberately and even painfully, and also abandoning that self, all at the same time. This harbo- red an unresolved conflict, and contributed to the explosive power of Alijt Bake’s teaching, also to her mixed reception, even among her own sisters and community. It was ultimately a contradiction most religious persons could not live with. Most sought to resolve it in one way or another, most in ascesis, some in negative mysticism. Each impulse tugged against the other, in some deep sense threatened the other. Many, I submit, implicitly grasped this – and preferred to stay away from its attendant tensions. To close out my lectures, I would like to suggest, tentatively, that Thomas of Kempen understood and, as it were, “contained,” or “bottled up” for future generations, the explosive power of this “revolution” in the understanding of religious life. You may not entirely agree, and I will have to present my argument briefly here, virtually as a summation. Thomas of Kempen (ca. 1379- 1471) was one of those students at Deventer won from an ambitious life in the secular clergy. During the 1390s, as a teen, he “was present and looked on every day” at the household of the Devout, both the men and women (to whom he on occasion acted as a messenger). He saw “devout people who lived in the world among lay people and yet had nothing to do with the life of the world and showed no concern for temporal affairs.” They had, in his experience, patiently to endure the “mockery of the worldly.” A quarter century later, now professed as a Windesheim canon outside Zwolle, Thomas gathered into booklets, most agree, the spiritual sayings that circulated through these houses. Four of those booklets eventually came together as the book we call the Imitation of Christ. Completed already by the early 1420s, not long after he had departed from Deventer, the booklets circulated quickly, often individually, with a famous copy in his own hand dated to 1441, the year incidentally of Alijt Bake’s breakthrough. For all the work on questions of authorship and text and dating over the years, we all, historians and religious alike, have still to understand why this book achieved such enormous success, why the Jesuits for instance would make it their own, why Protestants would take it over as well. That is not explained merely by seeing it as a useful compilation of so many religious platitudes. Many of the sayings gathered in these booklets arose out of and captured still the sense of a life led between monastery and world: Learn to despise out- ward thinges and to converte thee to inward things, and thou shalt see the reaume of God come into thee38 – exactly Alijt Bake’s message to her sisters,

38 Thomas, Imitatio Christi II.1. For the purposes of this essay I am using the first English translation, made still in Thomas’s lifetime (ca. 1460) and now newly edited: B.J.H. Biggs, The 260 JOHN VAN ENGEN even as prioress of a new house of canonesses. This life demanded a radical turn inward, indeed care first of all of your self: “An inwarde man bifore al other cures taketh cure of himselfe.” “Thou shalt never be inwarde and a devoute man [internus et devotus] but yf thou kepe silence of other men and specially biholde thyselfe. Yf thou take heede alleonely to God and to thiselfe, hit shall litel meve thee that thou perceyveste withoutforthe. Where arte thou when thou arte not present to thiselfe?”39 Plainly this addressed professed religious strug- gling with worldiness and trouble within the cloister, and Thomas did serve for a time as novice master. But its tone and its insights arose out of, and worked specially well for, Sisters and Brothers living between world and cloister, also for laypeople still in the world who had no protective legal screen or cloister wall. The goal is to achieve spiritual rest, inner peace, and that despite all the things, and especially all the people, around one. “Sette thiselfe furste in pees, and then shalt thou mowe these other. A pesible man avayleth more then a grete lerned man.” “But a man to lyve pesibly with harde and overthwarte men, and indiciplynate and contrariouse, is a grete grace and a commendable and a manly dede.”40 The goal may be to know “peace” in one’s “heart,” but a sense of spiritual anxiety pervades many of these sayings. Indeed, opposition is useful and even necessary, to keep focused and spiritually sharp, thus in the first booklet (extant in 29 Middle Dutch manuscripts, most meant for women’s houses): Hit is goode to us that we have sumtyme grevaunces and contrarie- tez, for oftetymes thei calle a man into hymselfe, that he mowe knowe himselfe to be in an exile, and that he put not his truste in any yerthely thinge. Hit is good that sumtyme we suffre ageinsayars and that men feele of us yvel and unperfetly, yea thoghe we do welle and mene welle.41 In such a way of life, “conversion” was not a point in time, a single act of making profession or entering a religious house. A spiritual person had always to keep up their guard, even inside a religious house, always taking heed of their selves, and so their conversion had also to be continuous, always cultivated and reaffirmed. Thomas expressed this as a daily prayer: Every day we owe to renewe oure purpose and styrre oureselfe to fervoure, as thoghe we this day be furste converted, and seie, “Helpe me, Lorde God, in my goode purpose, and in thi service, and graunte me this daie to bigynne perfitly; for noght hit is that I have done unto this tyme.”42 With no cloister wall, no separation in law or estate, theirs had to be a decisive turn inward. Over and over again he insisted: Better hit is a man to be hydde and take cure of himselfe, thenne takynge none heede of himselfe to worche wonders.43 As their households existed between religion and the world, so the mental and spiritual life of these Devout hung

Imitation of Christ (Early English Text Society n. 309, Oxford 1997), here p. 40. 39 Imitatio 2.5, ed. Biggs, p. 46. 40 Imitatio 2.3, ed. Biggs, p. 44. 41 Imitatio 1.12, ed. Biggs, p. 15. 42 Imitatio 1.19, ed. Biggs, p. 23. 43 Imitatio 1.20, ed. Biggs, p. 26. NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 261 always on the edge, was always being tested. This drive toward peace by way of caring busily for the interior may recall that which mystics like Alijt and Margarete believed they had finally to overcome, empty out, pass beyond, to achieve real union with God. For Thomas, part of his self-conscious appeal, likely rooted in his own experience, the articulation began in a broader world of human interaction, trouble, and disappointment. The aim was to withdraw personally from this unsettling world, find within a deep inner peace. Translated to the Devout movement, this was the ultimate aim for each member of a household, worked out on their own and in their own room (for each canon or canoness within their own cell, for each Brother or Sister within their own chamber or cranny) – and yet also a communal effort. This required a continuous keeping watch over yourself, a custodia sui ipsius, as he called it: If thou wolte have pees and very onehede, thou must sette alle aside and onely have thiselfe before thine yen.44 The second booklet, a call ad interna, in English ammonycions drawynge gretely inwarde, in Dutch van der inwendigher wanderinghe, issues this promise: Criste shall come to thee shewynge thee his consolacion [troestelicheit], yf thou make to hym withinforte a worthi dwellynge place. Not only will Christ come dwell in you, to offer you solace and comfort, he will enable you to transcend all that binds and pains you in this life, even to rise above to divine pleasures: A lover of Jhesu and a very inwarde man and free from inordinate affeccions may freely turne himself to God and lyfte hymselfe above hymselfe in spirite and ther reste fruybly [rusten in den ghebruken].45 Thomas spoke of rising above the self to God, of finding rest in a kind of divine joy, the word there, in Dutch, the one long associated with mystic experience of the divine. This was language he knew and could invoke, even if he did so more cautiously and in a way (“peace”) likely to enjoy a broader appeal. So Thomas too said, notably, that grace can come only if you make yourself nothing and empty yourself of all love of creatures: Thes folke cometh not to very liberte of herte, ner to the grace of my [Christ’s] iocunde familiarite, but hole resignacion and daily offringe of hemselfe furst made, withoute the whiche onhed of fruicion standeth not…I have seide to thee ful ofte and yette I seie agyeine: forsake thiselfe, resigne uppe thiselfe, and thou shalt fryshe grete pees. Yive alle for all, seke nothinge…and thou shalte have me. Thou shalt be free in herte, and darkenes- ses shul not overgo thee.46 Here Thomas echoed – liberty, resignation, fruition, enjoyment, darkness – all the language of the mystics, and placed it in the mouth of Christ! Such sayings are only occasional, but enough, I would argue, to acknowledge and capture the spirit of that radical contemplative turn inward even while living in the world. Thomas backed away from its dangerous edges, its most radical claims about how one knew and experienced oneness with God. He preferred to concentrate on inner peace. But he was aware of it, and

44 Imitatio 2.5, ed. Biggs, p. 46. 45 Imitatio 2.1, ed. Biggs, p. 40, 42. 46 Imitatio 3.42, ed. Biggs p. 112. 262 JOHN VAN ENGEN alluded to it, a part, I believe, of his appeal. The enormous and diverse reception of Thomas’s booklets came in part from his role in canonizing and passing on what I have called this second revolution in the understanding of the religious life, represented in this talk by the Devout in the Low Countries. At the heart of it was a call, open to women and men alike in all stations, for people to shape their own religious life, inwardly and outwardly, this conceived as a strenuous and constant exercise. Yet it was never far removed from a realization that a person had to transcend that striving self, relax that carefully scru- tinized and guarded self, so it could enter nakedly into an experience of union with the divine, the only joy and peace.

SUMMARY

By speaking of a “second revolution” in the medieval understanding of religious life I am not trying to be sensational. Any such claim would require a good deal of working out in detail and might well settle upon a more suitable term. I am trying, quite simply, to alert historians to real shifts in the understanding and practice of religious life across medieval Europe in the later middle ages, helping us get past the habit of treating most developments as after-thoughts to the twelfth-century revival, however influential that moment was and remained. First, the mendicants worked a real revolution, bringing religion into towns and streets and houses, into the active as well as the contemplative life. For a century and far longer, they set the pace, enjoying enormous success and con- tinuing influence. Second, there came a reaction, which accelerated through the mid- fourteenth century, sometimes embittered (anti-mendicant feelings ran high in the later middle ages), sometimes throwing up alternatives (the remarkable new prestige of Carthusians), sometimes embellishing and extending mendicant teachings (for instance, those of the friars Suso, Tauler, and Eckhardt). This later era, with its second turn, witnessed a decided move toward (or, if you like, re-turn to) forms of the contemplative life. While it usually now presumed charity or ascesis or teaching (though those occasionally got cast as the nemesis), women and men alike hungered for the fullest possible union with the deity, for a life apart that brought “rest” or “peace,” a unitive state beyond willing and desiring. They generally built upon intense asceticism still, now as well numerous devotional exercises (that for which the Devout are perhaps most remembered). All this, further, might well go together with a second dimension in this “revolution,” with practicing of religion outside “Religion” or beyond religion (Suso’s para- digmatic conversion after life inside the cloister). This could be expressed by cultivating the virtues outside vows, forming community or a commune outside the convent. The New Devout looked like “religious” and yet its founders, those whom Thomas presented as the “fathers,” consciously chose not to take vows. To live this way required a self-consciousness about the self, a “watching over,” a “taking care,” that placed it in constant tension with a potentially hostile or subversive environment. But at the same time they yearned to lose that carefully watched self in oneness with the deity. All this, as I see it, introduced a paradox, verging on a contradiction, between the self-making that energized Devout life and the self-emptying prerequisite to folding “nearly without distinction” into union with God: in their spirits to strive and to relax at the same time, to cultivate the self and also to resign the self. Their unusual social state rendered them potentially suspect to laity and the professed alike, a hybrid estate for which there was NEW DEVOTION IN THE LOW COUNTRIES 263 no easy place in medieval society. Their vision of union rendered them potentially suspect for failing to acknowledge adequately the place of grace administered through the church’s sacraments or indeed the crucial distinction between Creator and creature. And yet, in ways that the traditional upholders of medieval church and society could not easily grasp, these tensions, and the means the Devout found for articulating and negotiating them, held an appeal that reached beyond the limited circle of those formally attached to the Devout movement. This experimenting with inbetween states, in society as well as in the divine-human encounter, appears emblematic, to me at least, of broader shifts in religious life in later medieval Europe, and about these the Modern Devout were more articulate than most.

Address of the author: Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame, 715 Hesburgh Library, Notre Dame, IN 46556-5629, United States of America