Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages

by John Van Engen

"Winner of the 2009 John Gilmary Shea Prize from the American Catholic Historical Association Received the 2009 Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History Awarded the 2010 Otto Gruendler Prize by the Medieval Institute Awarded the 2013 Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America" 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.

Genres: History, Religion, Textbooks, Christianity

448 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

About the author

John H. Van Engen is an American historian, and Andrew V. Tackes Professor of Medieval History, at Notre Dame University. He is a 1984 Guggenheim Fellow, and 2011 Berlin Prize Fellow. He won the 2010 Otto Gründler Book Prize, and John Gilmary Shea Prize.

Reviews

[Jacob Hiserman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Van Engen maintains in Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life that the Modern-Day Devout who existed as a religious community from the 1380s-1560s cultivated their interior self and built communities modeled on the early Christian church in order to combat the lax religiosity and materialism of their day. He wades into the deep historiographical waters of the Devout. Historians interpreted the Devout as proto-Protestants, pre-Renaissance humanists, a turning point in European history, an interesting case in moral psychology, and part and parcel of Dutch national character and Belgian mysticism, among many other things. Van Engen distinguishes himself from all previous historians of the Devout by interpreting the Devout as religious representatives of their late medieval world. He treats their religion in its historical context and not as a means for a historical agenda such as nationalism, Protestantism, or moral psychology. Furthermore, Van Engen clearly parses particular terms such as “devotio” and “moderna” to demonstrate their meaning for the Devout in their religious, cultural, and social contexts. For example, he clearly stresses throughout the book that “moderna” should not be translated and understood as “modern” but rather “present-day” as it relates to former times such as the early Christian church. In that way, Van Engen views the Devout spirituality as a reaction and solution to contemporary ecclesiastical problems instead of an intellectual or spiritual forerunner for later religious movements.

Additionally, Van Engen raises a few interesting methodological points. He uses the case of the Devout to illuminate the vibrant late medieval religious world numerous other medieval historians characterized as a period of decline or an “autumn” in Huizinga’s famous (or infamous) description. He also sprinkles literary references from William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer throughout his chapters, such as his discussion of lay-clerical interaction using Chaucer: “Such nearness [of parish priests and laypeople] could foster mutual sympathy, most famously Chaucer’s idealized rendering of his Parson, brother to his Plowman, his Clerk (student), notably also coming in for gracious treatment.” (p. 138) With those two literary sources, Van Engen paints a more comprehensive picture of late medieval religious life than the Devout along could provide. He also touches on pertinent themes of class tensions in the various social orders that enter male and female Devout houses (p. 127-8, 137).

One of the main parts of Van Engen’s historiographical reassessment of the Devout remains their defiance of the set categories of late medieval life. The Devout comprise male and female houses that share goods in common without a rule. Most medieval religious lived according to a rule. Some of the Devout became canons and thereby adopted a rule, such as the male Windesheim congregation. Other Devout men remained brothers or priests without adopting a rule. Van Engen stresses the Devout’s presence “in religion” and their status as “religious” even though conversion to religion usually denoted taking vows (p. 125).

[Bekah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about the Modern-Day Devout