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  • 26 - Empowerment through reading, writing and example: the Devotio moderna

  • from PART VII - REFORM AND RENEWAL
  • Edited by Miri Rubin, Queen Mary University of London, Walter Simons, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    02 July 2009, pp 405-419

  • Summary

    During the last decades of the fourteenth century a movement of religious revival started in the present-day Netherlands, which came to be known as the Modern Devotion. The Modern Devout led a life of reading, writing, meditation and prayer. The attitude of the New Devout towards mysticism was characterised by ambivalence. Speculative mysticism of the Dominican type, represented by Meister Eckhart, found no echo among them. The typical work for men was the writing of books, as scribes or as authors. Writing pro pretio had some economic relevance; clients were found mainly among the clergy and in the many women's convents of which the brethren had pastoral care. All these texts, however, were in one way or another subservient to the common goal of improving the lives of the houses and their inhabitants: empowerment through reading and writing. Gabriel Biel was an exception to the rule that the Devotio moderna stayed aloof from university life.