Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life

The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages

John Van Engen

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812223071
• eBook ISBN: 9780812290059
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte des Mittelalters

The Devotio Moderna, or Modern Devout, puzzled their contemporaries. Beginning in the 1380s in market towns along the Ijssel River of the east-central Netherlands and in the county of Holland, they formed households organized as communes and forged lives centered on private devotion. They lived on city streets alongside their neighbors, managed properties and rents in common, and worked in the textile and book trades, all the while refusing to profess vows as members of any religious order or to acquire spouses and personal property as lay citizens. They defended their self-designed style of life as exemplary and sustained it in the face of opposition, their women labeled "beguines" and their men "lollards, " both meant as derogatory terms. Yet the movement grew, drawing in women and schoolboys, priests and laymen, and spreading outward toward Münster, Flanders, and Cologne.The Devout were arguably more culturally significant than the Lollards and Beguines, yet they have commanded far less scholarly attention in English. John Van Engen's magisterial book keeps the Modern Devout at its center and thinks through their story anew. Few interpreters have read the Devout so insistently within their own time and space by looking to the social and religious conditions that marked towns and parishes in northern Europe during the fifteenth century and examining the widespread upheavals in cultural and religious life between the 1370s and the 1440s. In Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life, Van Engen grasps the Devout in their humanity, communities, and beliefs, and places them firmly within the urban societies of the Low Countries and the cultures we call late medieval.

CHAPTER ONE

Converts in the Middle Ages

Since…certain women commonly called “beguines” who—since they promise obedience to no one nor renounce personal property nor profess any approved rule—are in no way “religious” though they wear a habit…we, rightly holding them suspect, with the approval of the council hold that their estate (statum) is perpetually to be prohibited and wholly abolished from the church of God.

—Cum de quibusdam (1317)

Right reason does not suffer that the innocent be judged equally with the harmful…. beguines of this kind, not chargeable nor suspect…by the advice of our brother [cardinals] we wish and declare not to be included…. Nonetheless, the estate of the kind of beguines we permit to be, unless it is ordained otherwise concerning them by the apostolic see, we in no way intend by the foregoing to approve.

—Ratio recta (1318)

GEERT GROTE OF Deventer (b. 1340) spent his first thirty-four years, to midlife by medieval standards, in pursuit of a clerical career, inquisitive about learning, eager for office and income, restlessly underway. The only legitimate heir of patrician parents, orphaned at ten by the plague, he went to Paris in his mid-teens, earned his master's beret in 1358, and stayed on as a regent master in arts. From age twenty-two he applied repeatedly to the curia at Avignon for church incomes (1362, 1363, 1365, 1366, 1371). Named in 1362 the “most celebrated” of those supplicating that year from the English nation, he was identified in 1366 as studying law after “having labored hard for more than seven years in the natural [astrology], moral, and other speculative sciences”—possibly including theology since he resided for a time at the Sorbonne. Meanwhile he kept his house at Deventer, consulted on law, and twice in 1366–67 acted on behalf of his native city at Avignon. Already in November 1362 he had received an expectative for a canon's prebend at Aachen (obtained in the later 1360s), in 1371 another for St. Martin's in Utrecht.¹ In all this Master Geert Grote of Deventer proved a fourteenth-century type. Thousands of “clerics” (a term signifying “book-man” as well as “church-man”) made their careers facilitating the business of church and society, having indeed become indispensable to it, whatever resentments that stirred up. But not all proved successful. Many lived on the hunt for patrons or positions. Langland the poet sniped at those from poor parishes who sought “to have a licence and a leve in Londoun to dwelle/and synge ther for symonye while selver is so swete”²—self-mockery in part from a west-country cleric working as a book-man in London. Master Geert, about the year 1374, found this way of life “more unclean” than he had words for.³ He resolved to make a “turn.”

Grote left no harrowing conversion story.⁴ He penned notes, “resolutions, not vows,” and drew up a reading list.⁵ Scholars have read these as a kind of diary, a glimpse inside. They were a first in fact, a convert working out on paper a new plan of life. His resolve to “order his life” now to the service and honor of God proceeded with a mix of intentions and pragmatic reasoning. First, he would seek no more benefices: gaining one only fueled avarice for more and holding several destroyed peace of mind. Nor would he serve cardinals or prelates to gain patronage, or cast horoscopes to win the favor of lords. He would not pursue the lucrative arts, medicine, astrology or law, since such people, corrupted by gain, rarely remained just (equus) in their reasoning or at peace (quietus) in their outlook. He would give up the liberal arts as useless, and focus on moral arts. He would not seek degrees or write books to curry fame. He would shun as pointless and provocative the public disputations of artists and theologians, such as at Paris. He would pursue no degree in theology since such people thought “carnally”—and he could have the learning without the degree. He would offer no consultations in law or medicine except to help friends or kin, recoiling particularly from horoscopes and reckonings. To Master Geert it all looked tainted with self-interest. He wrote this out amid his turn, most likely in 1374/75 while mainly resident in Deventer and Utrecht.⁶ In September 1374 he transformed his family house into a hospice, and by October 1375 gave up his benefices at Aachen and Utrecht.

In the decade between his inner turn and his death of plague (1374–84) he moved piecemeal toward an alternative lifestyle. One letter betrays a painful inversion of relationships. A wealthy young relative (Berthold ten Hove⁷) had made a promise of virginity on some occasion, then grew troubled at the thought of separating from family, also worried that he was not “sensing” the Spirit in his “interior person.” Grote saw the young man as “sweet in nature and pliable and inclined to be a ‘joiner’.” The Spirit of God, he noted, though present, is hidden (absconditus). This should not surprise: we barely “taste” our own “cognitive spirit,” whence our attraction to palpable realities. Watch out, he warned, for vain circles (societates). Frequent the poor friends of Christ. As for kinship, he reassured him, I will not leave you: by the Father's conceiving we are brothers in spirit. This play on words brought scant comfort, and Grote relented: Come visit, and “I will tell you about our father, about mother, the friends in our kinship, from whom we will not be separated into eternity.” Agreeing then to converse about family, Grote insisted on pointing toward Father God and “friends” forming a kinship of spirit.

In the fall of 1383⁸ Master Geert responded to queries about the papal schism from a Parisian friend thirty years senior in age and much higher in rank. William of Salvarvilla, chanter at Notre Dame and master of theology, now archdeacon for Brabant in the bishopric of Liège, was forced out of Paris in March 1382 for leaning “notoriously” to the Roman claimant.⁹ But he grew disgusted with his new “worldly” duties (including driving out partisans of Avignon) in a post sumptuous with housing and banquets and staff. All this resonated with Master Geert, his experience exactly, he said (Experior hec valde in me). The “inner person” is “flooded” by the “outer person.” William, he warned, should not descend blindly into the “ruin of the church so patent all about them” but stick with the few serious people (graviores). He issued a caution: the proper end is temperance and frugality, not strict austerity. He admitted to remaining at odds with himself, fearing to starve his spirit, then taking too much for his body. He hinted that the present state of affairs—papal schism, clergy with companions—pointed toward the prophesied end-times. This “fall” (casus ecclesie), this “abundance of evil arising from neglect,” might nonetheless prove “useful” if clergy were jolted into giving up their habitual ways and came “to live out of books and truthfully, not absorbed in ecclesiastical busy-work.”

Grote's own resolutions had moved directly from his clerical renunciations to a reading list beginning with the Gospel, followed by the lives and sayings of the Desert Fathers—all conceived still as learning (Revertor ad scientias). In the later 1370s he went into retreat, spending time especially at the Carthusian house outside Arnhem but in the end joining no order. After roughly four years he emerged as a deacon, and now crisscrossed the diocese of Utrecht on self-made preaching tours (late 1379–fall 1383), making converts. To make sense of this and the Devout communities that soon appeared, we must first put in place the thousand-year history of medieval conversion.

Conversion as a Medieval Form of Life

What “convert” brings to mind for us, persons moving from one community of belief or practice to another, most medieval Europeans rarely saw. They lived in the land of the christened. About infidels they knew mostly legends, storied characters beyond the lands of the churched. In Iberia Christians interacted with Jews and Muslims, but elsewhere—even if some encountered Jews at court or in cities, and a few dealt with peoples beyond the frontier—most spent their lives inside Christian culture. Abelard noted bluntly that Jews and Christians owed their faith allegiances to birth-parents and custom.¹⁰ And yet converts were everywhere to see. For in the experience and language of medieval Europeans this term denoted, often first of all, those who left family and friends to take up a dedicated spiritual life. Converts sought to realize a “perfect” life, implicitly calling into question the adequacy of ordinary religious practice. This deliberate reconfiguring of life toward an envisioned perfect form released a dynamic that energized and upset medieval society for a thousand years.

In medieval history conversion came to represent a life-form in church and society.¹¹ Already in late antiquity key markers of human life—birth, marriage, property, power, death—had become interwoven with Christian claims and rituals, the social and religious co-opting each other, christening thus meaning at once baptism and naming. Opting out of Christian practice entirely, if exceptionally undertaken by converts to Judaism or Islam, was largely unimaginable. People harbored doubts, and rankled over obligations. But finding fault did not mean moving into a heretical stance—that too, on the whole, was exceptional. People might far more readily slip into neglectful indifference or passive resistance, this not easy to get at, though preachers railed at it constantly. Most people carried out their expected routines more or less (these too varying by place and century), some with heart, some without thinking. For those not content with inherited religious practice, however, haunting questions arose: If everyone was accounted Christian, was anyone truly Christian? How could you tell, especially for yourself ? If the privileged (monks and nuns) counted as the religious, where did that leave the ordinary and the poor? If the privileged were hypocrites, what of religion in general? Such questions may have troubled only a few, or most people only on occasion—we have limited ways of knowing. But for some it consumed heart and mind. Preaching to student-clerics in Paris in 1139 Bernard of Clairvaux declared: Converting was God's will (voluntas eius conversio nostra), for there was “no true life for us except in conversion, and no other access to a true life.”¹²

Conversion first took on additional meanings when a Christian majority emerged in fifth-century Rome. Some now chose to separate from the compromised life of the ordinary baptized. Anthony left Roman Alexandria for the Egyptian desert, as did thousands more around the Mediterranean, their acts paradigmatic for the middle ages. That storied act jolted Augustine into converting (in our sense), followed soon by his converting in the second (leaving city, career, mistress, and betrothed for a country retreat and like-minded group). Throughout the middle ages converts, moved by inner conviction, also by social pressure or material need, turned away from the “world”—sex and family life, goods and private ownership, power and mastery over one's own will—toward “things on high” as well as “things within.” By an act of earthly renunciation they gained, if they persevered, heavenly exaltation. They might also attain, a paradoxical inversion, exaltation on earth. For they emerged collectively as medieval Europe's first estate, representing “religion” in all its fullness. In the poem Piers Plowman Haukyn the baker, figure of the “active life,” is depicted as constantly soiling his cloak, his white christening garb, with every conceivable sin, a filthy mess, only to give it a bit of a scrubbing once a year at Lent. Converts, by contrast, cast off their dirtied outer cloak, the muck of ordinary life in christened Europe, to free themselves for constant cleansing (“penance”), also undertaking an interior scrubbing that went beyond appearances or annual duty. They undertook metanoia or change of mind (“penance”).

Conversion assumed differing life-forms across historical time. Early on it got institutionalized. To convert was to enter a monastery and take vows under a Rule. Conversion thus entailed, apart from matters of the heart, a change in social estate with lasting human consequences. Like marriage (the analogy explicit), it was a move that might be arranged by others with material conditions attached, especially entrance gifts analogous to dowries. Church lawyers eventually framed the act of profession with definitions, thereby rendering conversion a technical term akin to betrothal. A convert entered into a recognized legal estate, adopted a Rule for life (conversatio), gained a measure of social prestige, and looked to a heavenly reward. Like marriage, this was a lasting bond, the one vow impeding the other, unless husband and wife both voluntarily agreed to join the higher estate of religion.¹³ Leaving a monastery was as difficult as leaving a marriage. It brought great opprobrium, the person accounted an “apostate,” the term itself telltale, conversion's opposite.

The cloister, however, could never fully contain the potency latent in conversion. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, after generations of recruitment to monastic life primarily by way of child oblation (like child baptism, an expression of parental or group practice more than individual will), adult converts appeared on the historical stage in numbers. Robert of Arbrissel toured the French countryside in outlandish garb haranguing recruits, at least as his shocked critics told it, gathering women converts in particular and so, critics charged, putting them at risk by displacing them from home and family without adequate shelter or control.¹⁴ Guibert of Nogent, writing about 1115, recalling similar stories from his youth, looked back on it all as “the beginnings of the conversions of that time” (conuersionum tunc temporis extulere primordia)—his phrase for what we call the twelfth-century reform.¹⁵ Adolescent students, adult clerics, troubled noblemen, interested women—all made their distinctive “turns.” Unlettered peasants now did so too, giving the word yet another meaning, “lay brother.” Some converts acted as religious innovators to the end; others channeled energy into new forms of organized monastic or eremitic life; still others found their forms and energies disapproved. Churchmen and lay lords also pushed back, privileging conversion and trying to claim its spiritual benefits but also trying to domesticate it. Robert's foundation at Fontevraud, lampooned in the 1110s, became the burial place for Henry II, Eleanor of Acquitaine, and Richard Lionheart.

Conversion's appeal could touch any segment of society, also, perhaps puzzlingly for moderns, the secular clergy. In his early twenties Bernard of Clairvaux left the local secular clergy to join a house of radical monks at Cîteaux. Twenty-five years later (probably All Saints 1139), addressing a crowd of student-clerics in Paris, he lambasted them for careerism and ambition, for entering the church without a spiritual calling. He now urged them to leave school and clerical life for a new monastery like his. He met with little response, and in frustration he turned this sermon into the first tractate on conversion. In it he deployed an image. A person wearing a filthy garment will cast it off. But anyone looking inside at the rank bilge-water of his own memory will find himself caught, for memory is constitutive of the self and a defiled soul cannot cast off its own self. Were he to impose law on this self, it would protest: “What's with this new religion (Unde haec nova religio)?” But Bernard darkly warned: “do not be secure” (Noli esse securus). Do not confide in a broad (inclusive) net (of salvation); for not all fish are reckoned good or will be kept.¹⁶

Conversion also took the form of converting the converted. Cistercians challenged Benedictines, and in the later middle ages Observants in all orders called for new strict adherence to Rules and customs.¹⁷ Too many had entered for the wrong reason or lost heart amid cloistered routines, as Thomas of Kempen noted: “we find ourselves better and purer in the beginning...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: The Devotio Moderna and Modern History
• Chapter 1 - Converts in the Middle Ages
• Chapter 2 - Modern-Day Converts in the Low Countries
• Chapter 3 - Suspicion and Inquisition
• Chapter 4 - From Converts to Communities: Tertiaries, Sisters, Brothers, Schoolboys, Canons
• Chapter 5 - Inventing a Communal Household: Goods, Customs, Labor, and “Republican” Harmony
• Chapter 6 - Defending the Modern-Day Devout: Expansion under Scrutiny
• Chapter 7 - Proposing a Theological Rationale: The Freedom of the “Christian Religion”
• Chapter 8 - Taking the Spiritual Offensive: Caring for the Self, Examining the Soul, Progressing in Virtue
• Conclusion - Private Gatherings and Self-Made Societies in the Fifteenth Century
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments