s a movement designed to give depth and fervour to religious life;
started by a burgher of Deventer, Geert Groote, toward the end of the
fourteenth century. It had embodied itself in two closely connected
forms--the fraterhouses, where the brethren of the Common Life lived
together without altogether separating from the world, and the
congregation of the monastery of Windesheim, of the order of the regular
Augustinian canons. Originating in the regions on the banks of the Ysel,
between the two small towns of Deventer and Zwolle, and so on the
outskirts of the diocese of Utrecht, this movement soon spread, eastward
to Westphalia, northward to Groningen and the Frisian country, westward
to Holland proper. Fraterhouses were erected everywhere and monasteries
of the Windesheim congregation were established or affiliated. The
movement was spoken of as 'modern devotion', _devotio moderna_. It was
rather a matter of sentiment and practice than of definite doctrine. The
truly Catholic character of the movement had early been acknowledged by
the church authorities. Sincerity and modesty, simplicity and industry,
and, above all, constant ardour of religious emotion and thought, were
its objects. Its energies were devoted to tending the sick and other
works of charity, but especially to instruction and the art of writing.
It is in this that it especially differed from the revival of the
Franciscan and Dominican orders of about the same time, which turned to
preaching. The Windesheimians and the Hieronymians (as the brethren of
the Common Life were also called) exerted their crowning activities in
the seclusion of the schoolroom and the silence of the writing cell. The
schools of the brethren soon drew pupils from a wide area. In this way
the foundations were laid, both here in the northern Netherlands and in
lower Germany, for a generally diffused culture among the middle
classes; a culture of a very narrow, strictly ecclesiastical nature,
indeed, but which for that very reason was fit to permeate broad layers
of the people.

What the Windesheimians themselves produced in the way of devotional
literature is chiefly limited to edifying booklets and biographies of
their own members; writings which were distinguished rather by their
pious tenor and sincerity than by daring or novel thoughts.

But of them all, the greatest was that immortal work of Thomas a Kempis,
Canon of Saint Agnietenberg, near Zwolle, the _Imitatio Christi_.

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