Devotio Moderna: Đối đầu Văn hóa Kinh viện và Đại học - Luận án Tiến sĩ Luke Rohan Tucker

Name: Luke Rohan Tucker Title: Devotio Moderna: Confrontations with Scholastic, University Culture Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Institution: The University of Sydney Year of Award: 2021 A thesis submitted to fulfil requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ABSTRACT The founding stories of the Devotio Moderna began with a book burning and explicit rejections of scholastic, university culture. Most scholars have either pitted the movement’s dimensions of pastoral care and teaching against each other as exclusive alternatives or have declined to treat the New Devout’s status as a culture of learning. However, if we are to take this mythos as essential to the movement, we must proceed from the outset that confrontations with scholastic, university culture lay at the heart of the Devotio Moderna.

This thesis suggests that either above approach is inadequate and misreads the movement. Using Charles Taylor’s framework of the Social Imaginary, this thesis argues that the Devotio Moderna developed based on an Augustinian Imaginary, a sense deriving from Augustine and his medieval interlocutors. By the time of the Observant Century, this Augustinian Imaginary, long since sustained by cathedral schools and monastic education, now stood in competition with the universitas, a competing Social Imaginary that the New Devout could not reconcile with their Augustinian Imaginary and therefore rejected. By articulating the Devotio Moderna’s daily habits of reading, writing, and prayer, this thesis argues that this site of conflict between the Devotio Moderna and scholastic, university culture loomed large in the movement’s imagination.

By relocating the key issues at stake in analysis of the Devotio Moderna, we also see the difficulty of the historian writing within the institution that the New Devout opposed, but which ultimately supplanted the movement. This thesis is therefore significant as a repositioning of analysis of the Devotio Moderna as a movement in relation fundamentally to scholastic, university culture, and in being an articulation of the difficulty for the universitas’ distant descendant, the modern discipline of history, to understand a historical movement animated by an imaginary opposed to that which vivified, and continues to vivify, university culture. 2 This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes.

I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources has been acknowledged. Luke Tucker 3 Devotio Moderna Confrontations with Scholastic, University Culture 4 Augustinus: Ecce oravi Deum Ratio: Quid ergo scire vis? A.: Haec ipsa omnia quae oravi.: Breviter ea collige.: Deum et animam scire cupio.7 5 Acknowledgments I want to thank first my supervisor Dr. John Gagné for his counsel, equanimity, and support over the course of writing this dissertation. John, thank you for your delightful mix of curiosity, gentleness, and erudition.

Couldn’t have done it without you. Besides my supervisor I would also like to thank Assoc. Nick Eckstein, Dr. Hélène Sirantoine, Prof.

Stephen Gaukroger, Dr. James Christie and Dr. Julie Ann Smith for their critique, support, and provoking discussion. Sydney University’s Medieval and Early Modern Centre (MEMC) also proved a valuable forum for testing out hunches and benefitting from pointed, clarifying conversation.

I am grateful for the opportunity to present a small part of this thesis in 2018 at the annual conference of the Society for Renaissance Studies. In the course of researching and information gathering I am thankful for the various archives who provided orientation and access to material for my work. In particular, I want to thank the Stadsarchief en Athenaeumbibliotheek Deventer, the Universiteit van Amsterdam, the Streeksarchief Midden-Holland in Gouda, and Bibliothèque du Séminaire Episcopal de Liège. This dissertation has ended up treading over several language barriers.

I am grateful for the Germanic Studies department at Sydney university and my kind and generous teachers Silke, Tristan, Phillipp, and Sabina for allowing me to take part in their courses as Gasthörer. Additionally, the German for Humanities reading group run by the late Brian Taylor was an unexpected joy and invaluable help. I wish Brian were still around to hear me say so. Various people have provided informal help in reading, critiquing, and editing my work.

I want to thank my mother Cathy Tucker, my wife Em, Matthew Payne, and Dr. Rory Shiner, who first encouraged me to consider seriously postgraduate study. Thanks guys! I doubt that would have survived the ordeal of writing a dissertation without the support, fellowship, and prayers of Matthew Moffit and the community of Christian scholars of EPS. Matt, it made all the difference that you didn’t ask me to justify my choice of period (the Dark Ages!) and that you regularly offered a gentle, reflective presence through the ups and downs of 6 postgraduate life.

Sam, thanks for all the Thai food and fellowship we shared together. Your support, empathy, and understanding got me through many difficult seasons of research and writing. Finally, I want to thank my wife Em. Em, thank you for your patience and forbearance as I stressed, pondered, and thought out loud over these last four years.

I would never have secured funding, navigated confusing paperwork, or correctly filled in online forms without your help and administrative wizardry. I don’t think just any wife would be so excited about the lifestyle that comes along with writing a dissertation, but you never complained about the costs that came with this project and were quick to affirm its value. Your encouragement and belief in the value and beauty of what I was doing sustained me over long periods of difficult, trying work. You helped me stop and rest when research began to creep into parts of my life it shouldn’t have, but were patient when I just had to dive into a book or knock out a bit more language work.

Your patient witness of faith kept me from losing heart and reminded me time and again where true wisdom is found. We made it! Soli Deo gloria. 7 A Note on Translations I am grateful for the help of my supervisor, Dr. John Gagné, in aiding me with accurate translations of French material.

Unless otherwise indicated all other translations are my own. 8 CONTENTS 1 Confrontations with Scholastic, University Culture. 10 2 Literature Review, Aims, and Objectives, Method. 64 4 New Options: Universitas.

97 5 Exhortations to Reading. 132 6 Time, Reading, and Rhythms of Life. 183 7 Book-copying and Book-production. 218 8 Pastoral Care and Teaching.

245 9 Erasmus and the Universitas. 316 11 Epilogue: Writing within the University. 331 9 1 CONFRONTATIONS WITH SCHOLASTIC, UNIVERSITY CULTURE The Devotio Moderna began with a book burning. In 1372, close to death, Geert Grote († 1384) agreed at the request of his priest to have his books of medicine and astrology burnt in order to receive what he thought was his last Eucharist.

Educated at the University of Paris for over a decade, Grote treasured these sources of knowledge and he did not give them up to the fire easily. Having first sent the priest away, Grote had a change of heart. As he looked back later, this was the beginning of his lifelong conversio, his turning towards God. Faced with the choice between his precious knowledge and receiving the body of Christ in preparation for death, Grote chose the latter.

Though Geert Grote did not in fact die, this near-death experience proved portentous. After his recovery, Grote was a changed man. Previously the libertine intellectual preparing to enter a lucrative clerical career, Grote forsook his possessions, his inheritance rights, and his status to embark on a tour of preaching around the Netherlands. His vision was to recapture the intense, lived-out piety of the ecclesia primitiva, a life characterized by humility, poverty, and the imitation of Christ.

This life he modelled became known to contemporaries by the moniker Devotio Moderna – the New Devout – a recapitulation of the manner of living of the early Christians.1 Grote’s newfound task was to bring this modern-day devotion of lived-out apostolic piety to a hard-hearted people in the Netherlands. 2 (Despite multiple options existing to translate Devotio Moderna, I have chosen to refer to the movement as the New Devout or simply by the Latin. This, I believe, captures the right sense of energy of a new movement of devotion and piety, while also reminding the reader by the original Latin that this movement entailed a reaching back to the past and not novel invention.) After his premature death in 1384 amidst one of the many waves of disease and pestilence that swamped his hometown of Deventer, a small band of his disciples began to meet in his house. van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 7.

van Engen, ‘New Devotion in the Low Countries’, Ons Geestelijk Erf 77, no. 3 Susanne Krauss, Die Devotio Moderna in Deventer: Anatomie eines Zentrums der Reformbewegung, (Berlin; Münster: Lit, 2007). 10 These followers spread quickly beyond Grote’s own house in Deventer throughout the Low Countries.4 This geographic region, the Low Countries, did not form a coherent political entity, nor was it unified by cultural practice or common vernacular. The patchwork of littoral and overland trade networks fell first under Burgundian power and, after its collapse in 1477, the Habsburg Empire.

One encounters Frisian dialects in the North; Dutch and Low German in the Netherlands, Westphalia, and the Rhineland; and French dialects in the South. Latin and its attendant ecclesiastical culture thus formed one of the few common threads running through the Low Countries in the long fifteenth century. The New Devout straddled these two worlds, the unified bloc of Latin culture and the patchwork of vernacular culture, as they established communities through the Low Countries. Three main works produced within the milieu of the New Devout have led to a view that the Devotio Moderna was primarily a Dutch movement.

These texts were written in Zwolle, Deventer, and Windesheim in the mid- and late-fifteenth century. Thomas à Kempis, an Augustinian monk at Agnietenberg (near Zwolle) personally familiar with Grote’s disciples wrote in his Dialogus noviciorum in the 1430s a history of the brothers aimed primarily at winning youths to their way of life. Thirty or so years later in 1458 Rudolph Dier Muden wrote a necrology of the brothers of the Windesheim congregation. This history, more historical than Thomas’, was supplemented by another brother of the house, Petrus Hoorn († 1479).

Roughly contemporary to this chronicle, Johann Busch († c.1480) documented the expansion of the New Devout in two separate works: Liber de origine devotionis modernae and Liber de viris illustribus. Many other brother- and sister-houses produced Vitae and chronicles of their houses, but the majority of such accounts were composed from within the diocese of Utrecht. Recently, however, scholars have pointed to the competing regional accounts and suggested that the genesis of the Devotio Moderna amounts less to an emanation from a single rough point – Deventer and Utrecht – and more a gradual conglomeration of multiple movements of observant reform. John van Engen has, in this way, shown how some the Brabantine New Devout saw themselves as stretching back to Jan van 4 Miri Rubin and Walter Simons, eds., Christianity in Western Europe c.

11 Ruusbroec at Groenendaal to identify the origins of his house.5 While this need not discount the centrality of Grote and his disciples for the formation of the Devotio Moderna, this early stage of the Devotio Moderna within the diocese of Utrecht being a key focus on this thesis, it must be remembered that its spread was more complex than an emanation from a single rough point. The Devotio Moderna spread from the area of modern-day Overijssel through the Netherlands, northern parts of Belgium and western parts of Germany.