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A New Chapter in the Story of the Vita Religiosa

The Three Ages of Salvation History

Medieval people typically saw themselves as living in an aging world. In the middle of the twelfth century, for example, Otto of Freising saw the world as already at its end, were it not for the monks’ appeasing intercessions before God. Around the middle of the thirteenth century, in stark contrast, the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais had a vision of a world rejuvenated, a world to which would be brought new strength through the youthful vitality of its religious orders.¹

In the epilogue to his encyclopedic history the Speculum historiale, completed in 1246, Vincent wrote that in his exegesis of Jeremiah,² the abbas Joachim spoke prophetically of two orders that would inaugurate a third age.³ The Lord, according to Joachim’s exegesis, had once used Moses and Joshua to defeat the hostile Canaanites, and later Paul and Barnabas to strike down the idolaters. Now finally he would use two orders to subdue an unbelieving people. Vincent thus believed he could discern how in the first age God had once chosen old men, in the second age young men (the apostles), and now, in the third age, young boys to proclaim the Gospel and the word of God. His talk of new orders was surely a veiled reference to his own Dominicans, and to the Franciscans.

The works of abbas Ioachim—as Joachim of Fiore (1130/35–1202) was called here—were alluring to orders that sought (as all sought in principle) to highlight their dignity within salvation history. The Calabrian Joachim, once a hermit, then a Cistercian, and finally in around 1190 the founder of his own Order,⁴ had written a number of works of biblical exegesis, though not the one noted here, which was presumably written under his name between 1243 and 1248.⁵ In his works he advanced with great vigor the theory that salvation history was unfolding in three stages: the age of the Father, corresponding to the Old Testament; the age of the Son, reaching from the time of Christ to the thirteenth century; and finally the age of the Holy Spirit, which was to supersede the era of the hierarchical, propertied church and to be led by monks, who would usher in an age of perfect peace on earth.⁶

The Franciscans, who were uneasy about their order’s departure from its original norms and who longed to return to the authenticity of Francis’s message, were especially taken by Joachim’s vision of a spiritual church led by monks, as was promised for those still on earth in the third age. Their stance in fact had roots that reached back to the time immediately after the death of the Poverello, but it grew stronger in the second half of the thirteenth century and led to both deep divisions within the Order and sharp conflicts with the hierarchical church. The discussion will later return to that development.

With his reference to Joachimist thought, Vincent of Beauvais had thus touched on a stirring theme of his era, and with its help he had strengthened a fundamental belief in the divinely inspired leadership of religious communities—especially in the two great mendicant orders. That particular stance deserves emphasis, because it signals, from the middle of the thirteenth century, a new chapter in the medieval story of the vita religiosa. At first glance, quite in contrast to Vincent’s projections into the future, it seems that the world of monasticism had passed its zenith.⁷ Over the course of the coming centuries no new order would approach the scope, presence, and influence of the four great mendicant orders. And there would only be one—the Birgittines—that would make for itself the same claim that the Franciscans, Dominicans, and earlier established forms of the vita religiosa had also made: to fulfill a calling within salvation history, or even to be salvation history institutionalized.

The shaping power of the vita religiosa, which had always found a way—whether driven from within or in reaction to ever-changing spiritual and social needs—to create entirely new forms of life, seems to have been extinguished. Soon after Vincent’s euphoric reflections, the main concern seems to have been to preserve through reform whatever might be salvaged of discipline and piety, as well as material resources and organizational structure.

Yet this image is deceptive, because it is seen in an unfocused light. Certainly these assessments are not false, but from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century there was vitality enough both to expand and to make new beginnings—a vitality that certainly rested on the kind of confidence that a figure like Vincent of Beauvais so consciously represented. On the one hand, the four major mendicant orders had come to influence every aspect of society: the cities, the nascent universities, courts, and church institutions. They grew to become leaders of the spiritual elite of Christendom, and when all seemed lost after the fall of Acre in 1291, two of them even spearheaded Christian missions to the farthest reaches of Asia.

On the other hand, two main sources for the continued establishment of new forms of religious life proved to be anything but exhausted: first, the lay religious movement that at the opening of the thirteenth century had already been approved (in the form of the Humiliati) by a church that was willing to recognize it in principle and that continued to build on that foundation; second, the timeless impetus to take literally the call to turn from the world and to seek God by retreating into the eremitical solitude of the desert. And finally there was still the traditional world of the Benedictines, Cistercians, and Premonstratensians, the foundations of the regular canons, and the settlements of so many eremitical congregations, such as the Grandmontines and Carthusians, now centuries old—all of which sought not only to preserve their own traditions but also to make room for new impulses.

It is certainly hard to escape the impression that the landscape of Latin Christendom in the later Middle Ages had long been densely packed with monastic institutions. What can at first glance seem like overgrown stagnation can thus perhaps be traced back to nothing other than an overly satisfied demand, or an exhaustion of human and material resources—which would be reduced further still in the age of the Black Death⁸ and the Hundred Years’ War.⁹

To render an overview of these complex circumstances more manageable, they cannot be confronted comprehensively, in chronological sequence. Rather, we must draw from them a series of contrasts that make it possible to highlight particular developments in the world of late-medieval monasticism.

To that end, the following aspects deserve attention. First, the analysis focuses on circumstances that fostered new institutions. Here the attention is on the phenomenon of the continued growth of eremitical communities and on a novel configuration in the life of religious community among regular canons known as the Devotio moderna—the so-called Modern Devotion—as well as the growth of an order that even laid claim to its own rule, the Order of the Savior or the Birgittines. The second theme is the struggle for universal recognition and the formation of institutional identity among recently established institutions, especially the mendicant orders. Third and finally, the analysis turns to reform movements that were either initiated by the papacy or developed autonomously by individual religious congregations. Of interest here are the reform projects of Pope Benedict XII and especially the Benedictine networks that sought a renewal of discipline in the fifteenth century. Any account of these diverse histories is of course subject to a certain abridgment and generalization.

Eremitical Congregations and the Work of Peter of Morrone

By virtue of its geographical scope, the unification of eremitical communities that established the Order of Augustinian Hermits in 1256 (noted above) encompassed broad sections of Europe, but its starting point was at first concentrated especially in central Italy. Across the broad expanse of Christendom in the same era, however, the eremitical life was lived nearly everywhere, and in a way in keeping with its essence—in groups that were small and scattered and that also stood on the threshold of a more apostolic orientation. Once again, the same challenges in principle remained: how to draw various groups together, and how to integrate them functionally into the church’s effort to meet a range of pastoral needs. In thirteenth-century Hungary we find an example of one attempt to meet those challenges—an attempt (despite certain aberrations due to a particular set of circumstances) that ultimately met with success.

Much like the forest of Craon in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, as noted above, the Pilis Mountains southwest of the River Donau’s turn in Hungary had long been a region especially dense with eremitical communities.¹⁰ There in 1250 Eusebius, a cathedral canon from Esztergom, founded the community of the Holy Cross for various eremitical groups from across his region. He also took over a second community, founded under the patronage of Saint James in 1225 by Bishop Bartholomew of Pécs. The bishop had founded this community, near Patacs in the Mecsek Mountains of southern Hungary, for previously scattered eremitical groups in his diocese. Both of these communities, drawn together by personal union and established from what had originally been small communities, presumably had access to a short collection of statutes that Bishop Bartholomew had already written for his community of St. James.

The number of communities grew rapidly. Nevertheless, the pope denied their 1262 petition to be recognized as an independent order. By that time, the Curia was thinking strongly in fiscal terms, and in view of the poverty of these eremitical communities it had no desire to create yet another mendicant order. In the following year the pope’s emissary, Bishop Paul of Veszprém, issued the congregation its own set of statutes; further statutes, more fully elaborated, followed in 1297 from the bishop of Esztergom. In 1308¹¹ a papal legate finally allowed the communities both to adopt the Rule of Augustine and to compose an extended body of statutes. It was here that the communities for the first time formulated what became their lasting designation as Ordo sancti Pauli primi eremite, the “Order of St. Paul the First Hermit.” In 1328 Pope John XXII confirmed the rule of the newly established order, its property as well as its constitutions. He also exempted the Order from episcopal power and from the obligation to pay tithes; a privilege of Gregory XI in 1377 then established the Order’s full exemption. The parallels to the transformations surrounding the Great Union of the Augustinian Hermits are clear.

Although the Paulines, as they are often called, did not expand dramatically from their heartland in greater Hungary, they were soon to be found in Poland, Germany, and by the fifteenth century even Portugal. Their organization was soon almost identical to that of the other mendicant orders, especially the Dominicans. Like them, by the time of their flowering in the fifteenth century, the Paulines took on the duties of pastoral care. They also devoted themselves to scholarship,¹² especially in the old, prescholastic tradition of monastic theology that seemed so natural to them.

The Paulines shared with the Augustinian Hermits and the Carmelites in particular a bold, sweeping return to an immemorial past. Their model, indeed their supposed founding father, was Paul of Thebes, whom the Vita written by Jerome had celebrated in the fourth century as the model desert hermit.¹³ Decisive for their self-understanding was that they looked back not to the creator of their rule, Augustine, but rather that they wanted to represent symbolically the archetype, so to speak, of eremitic life. The Paulines formed a community grounded in tradition, one that despite its apostolic mission never lost sight of the eremitic, contemplative life.

But the powerful attraction of the eremitic life also remained undiminished across thirteenth-century Italy. The Great Union of 1256 had in no way absorbed every eremitical community. As a consequence, the unifying framework of the Rule of Augustine, along with its apostolic orientation, did not de facto become the main principle of organization.¹⁴

One case that was normatively established long before 1256 illustrates this point. At the age of fifty, in the wake of a personally tragic experience arising from a bitter fight with his bishop, the priest Silvester Guzzolini (1177–1267) from Osimo in Ancona fled to a cave and lived as a hermit. A circle of companions soon joined him, and in 1231 he established an isolated monastery on the mountain of Fano in the March of Ancona. The community adopted the Rule of Saint Benedict and had their choice confirmed by Innocent IV in 1247. Thereafter further communities were established in the March of Ancona, in Tuscany, and in Umbria, leading to the formation of a transregional congregation, albeit still a small one, that after its founder’s death came to be called the Silvestrines.¹⁵ Some significant differences distinguish them from the Augustinian Hermits and Paulines. Here again at the origins stood a charismatic leading figure (like a Romuald or a Stephen of Obazine in the eleventh century, for example) from whom the community actually took its name. But there was no mention of the Rule of Augustine. Rather, the Benedictine tradition actually came closest to serving the needs of this eremitical group. And in the end the group remained independent.

A certain compatibility with these structures is notable in the case of a French congregation, whose example shows once again how experimental the eremitical embrace of the vita religiosa could be. According to tradition, a certain Gui (or Viard) left the Charterhouse of Lugny in Northern Burgundy in 1184 and retreated into the lonely forests of Châtillon-sur-Seine, between Troyes and Dijon.¹⁶ A short time later—as was common for hermits held in great esteem—a small group of like-minded followers gathered around him. Whatever the reliability of this story of origins, there is evidence that by the end of the twelfth century a settlement of hermits had been established near Châtillon in Val des Choux and that Duke Odo III of Burgundy had provided it with a monastery. In 1205 the hermits, now called Caulites (after the valley that was their home), received confirmation of their way of life from Innocent III, with the archbishop of Rheims as mediator.¹⁷ Over the course of the thirteenth century the congregation grew to twenty priories, most of them in Burgundy and the Île-de-France, but many also in the Netherlands and England.

The Caulite constitution was a unique combination of Carthusian and Cistercian elements. On the one hand, the members lived separately in strictest poverty and asceticism, fending for themselves in small huts, their community restricted to no more than twenty members. On the other hand, they took all of their meals in common, and they prayed and worked together. In 1215 they entered into a prayer confraternity with the Cistercians, and in 1224 Honorius III approved for them both an adaptation of their customs and the acceptance of the Benedictine rule but without requiring them to give up their eremitic way of life. By adopting significant portions of the Cistercians’ organizational norms, the congregation increasingly took on Cistercian standards, but throughout the Middle Ages it never lost its independence.

In Italy in the thirteenth century, all of Western Christendom experienced, in a literal sense, still another case, this one similarly experimental yet far more prominent. Celestine V (1209/1210–1296)¹⁸—the only medieval pope ever to have formally renounced his office—was elected in 1294 because the College of Cardinals had sought and then received (through a unanimous election guided by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit) a figure deeply grounded in personal piety. In the decades before his pontificate, Celestine had been the founder of an order.¹⁹

Peter of Morrone, as he was originally called, came from a rural family in the Abruzzo. He entered a Benedictine abbey as a boy, and after a few years resolved to pursue a quite common path, one for which the Benedictine rule itself had made provision: to retreat to a hermitage without giving up his connection with the monastery. In 1233/34, while in Rome seeking clarity about his future, he was ordained a priest. He then returned to the Apennine Mountains and, with the permission of his abbot, retreated once more to a hermitage, this one on the mountain of Morrone near the episcopal city of Sulmona. His experience there was similar to that of nearly all of his eremitical predecessors. His reputation as an ascetic, as a penitent, and as one who sought God soon spread, and a crowd of followers gathered around him. He created his first community, and though he disbanded it after only a few years, he never lost spiritual contact with its members.

Peter then struck out more deeply into the Apennines, into the mountainous wilds of Maiella. There too a community soon began to gather. They rebuilt an old, isolated church and named it after the Holy Spirit (S. Spirito a Maiella) because a dove had appeared to its members while they were at work restoring the church. Their choice of the name may very well have resonated with the Joachimist vision of a future age of the Holy Spirit. Because Peter was still a Benedictine, he gave his followers the Rule of Saint Benedict as a guide. But their holy way of life, which they had also lived in Morrone, now attracted patrons who wanted to invest in their own salvation. Moreover, the hermits enjoyed the support of the bishop and the commune of Sulmona, as well as of the Count of Manopello, the leading power in the region. Both settlements soon received land and the rights to rivers and forests.

By the 1260s the point had long since been reached that both of these communities, now firmly established both internally and externally, needed legal safeguarding by the papacy. Urban IV provided it in 1263, taking the church of Santo Spirito a Maiella and all of its properties under his protection.²⁰ He also assigned the Benedictine rule for the hermits, with the mediation of the local bishop of Chieti. The foundation had thereby been laid for a growing number of settlements whose network soon reached to Latium, but above all to the south. The kingdom of Sicily, which bordered the Papal States to the south and east, was in many respects the heartland of Peter’s community. There, as the Hohenstaufen era came to an end, Charles of Anjou had come to power with papal support in 1266. Peter found strong support in both Charles and his son and successor, Charles II, who would later also even help bring him to the papal throne.

The community, now properly established as a congregation and expanding, had begun to flower. But there soon emerged a danger from quite a different quarter. In Lyon in 1274, a general church council gathered and sought once again to review the implementation of the decrees of Lateran IV that had considerably limited the establishment of new religious foundations. At the center stood the mendicant orders, whose impact among the bishops and the secular clergy had inspired strong discontent.

In its openness to accepting new institutions, Christendom had over time become, as was discussed above, highly saturated with a great many different forms of a vita religiosa that still maintained its powerful attraction. Hermits with a strong pastoral presence could also easily inspire a certain degree of reservation and resentment. In that context, the bishop of Chieti took the stage at the Council of Lyon as a spokesman for a number of his episcopal colleagues, advocating that Peter’s congregation be disbanded. The reputation of his communities highlighted contrasting ways of life and thus seemed to the bishops to be a thorn in the side of every diocese, since monks still lived from their own manual labor and cultivated a strict ascetic life of fasting and penitential discipline. Moreover, the bishops sought to lay claim to the properties of the various foundations. In response, the elderly Peter of Morrone made his way on foot from central Italy to Lyon, seeking to save his community by appearing there in person. His commitment bore fruit: in March of 1274 he received renewed papal confirmation of his congregation.²¹

Although the churches of Peter’s congregation did carry out certain pastoral duties, their hermits remained true in the first instance to their life of retreat and contemplation. Even the administrators, though in a community that would soon take shape as an established order,²² held office for only a limited time, so that they would be able periodically to return to solitude. When an aging Peter of Morrone was elected pope in 1294 as Pope Celestine V, he had already long since retreated from any kind of leadership in the congregation. He had lived in his cell, turning to God in contemplation—and he now found himself God’s representative on earth, in a Curia that had masterfully shaped both a bureaucracy that was impenetrable to outsiders and an intricate web of figures obsessed with power. The “Angelic Pope,”²³ as the Franciscan Spirituals hoped he would be, the hermit of the desert, was destined to fail in that environment, even if he did erect (as tradition has it) a hermit’s enclosure in the papal palace. The same had been true for Bruno, who some two hundred years earlier had come to the Roman Curia from the solitude of the mountains and at once discovered that he had to flee once again into the forests of Calabria.

When Peter of Morrone was elected Celestine V, his Order had some thirty-five monasteries and some six hundred members who now called themselves Celestines. To the end of the Middle Ages they would continue to expand throughout all of Italy, as well as north of the Alps as far as Bohemia.

Yet the power of the eremitic life had at this point by no means exhausted itself. On the contrary, the spectrum of small congregations to be established in the future could be surveyed only with difficulty. A few examples can suffice. In 1313 the Sienese city councilman Bernardo Tolomei retreated with two followers to a solitary family estate south of Siena. The community grew rapidly thereafter, changed the name of its settlement to Monte Oliveto (the Mount of Olives), and by 1319 already enjoyed the recognition of the bishop of Arezzo. After the foundation of subsequent communities and the adoption of the Benedictine rule (in a slightly modified form), Pope Clement VI approved the established congregation in 1344, and by the middle of the fifteenth century it had some fifty communities spread across Italy.²⁴

Around 1350 in Toledo in Castile, a strong veneration of Jerome and the memory of his time in the desert inspired the formation of the small eremitical order of the Jeronimites, which lived according to the Rule of Augustine and was confirmed in 1373.²⁵ Its expansion was especially strong across the Iberian Peninsula as well as in Italy, and it was later closely associated with the Spanish crown. Emperor Charles V died in one of its houses.

The Pisan Pietro Gambacorta (1355–1435), similarly inspired by Jerome, created the congregation of the Poor Hermits of St. Jerome, which established close relationships with the Franciscans and lived according to statutes that consisted of norms drawn from (among others) the rules of Augustine and Francis and that prescribed charitable works above all.²⁶

The former disciple of Franciscan friars, Franz of Paola (1416–1507), joined with his companions in eremitical life to found a community in 1454, in Calabria’s Cosenza. In 1474 Pope Sixtus IV recognized it as the Order of the Minims.²⁷ Although limited at first to Italy, before the end of the century its influence had already spread to Germany and France.²⁸

The list of these groups could be extended. And its length is eloquent proof that the drive both to retreat from the world and also, from that place of retreat, to be open to those in need of pastoral care, had hardly faltered—even though the drive itself was increasingly captured in ever smaller, independent institutional formations. In conjunction with the attraction of individual charismatic figures who sought compelling influence through nothing but the extraordinary intensity of their piety, regional conditions, or particular political interests (especially the house of Anjou in southern Italy), often played an important role. But what may often have been just as decisive was that many who sought salvation obviously wanted to keep a certain distance from the great, established orders and to trust more strongly in those more individual avenues to the vita religiosa whose turn from the world seemed somehow more authentic. The eremitical life of the day might thereby also be understood as a place of refuge amid the inscrutable ways of the great, established religious corporations—or amid what was perceived as the dying embers of faith. Something similar had already happened in the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries, but it was now characteristic that new communities could no longer look for normative structures, as they once had, in a new rule or new statutes. Rather, they were forced to choose—and here they did have a certain freedom—one of the established rules, and they were anxious to receive quick approval from the head of the church. Yet it was no longer possible for the popes—though many often had the intention of doing so—to respond (as they had in 1256) by trying to draw together what had become such a bewildering variety of forms of religious life.

Devotio Moderna

In the last two centuries of the Middle Ages, the search for individual access to an extraordinary life of piety was also realized in a completely different way than through eremitic retreat. This development played itself out in the Netherlands and was at first associated with the strong need of laity to be able to devote themselves to a religious life without having to profess solemn vows. This kind of semireligious life had been known to the region by way of the Beguines, and it was not unfamiliar to the church hierarchy. On the contrary, all of the problems that might arise from unregulated religious communities were very well known.

Almost unmanageable social and religious tensions reigned in this remarkably prosperous region of the Netherlands. Unimaginable luxury stood side by side with the miserable poverty of the broader population. An unsatisfied longing for religious fulfillment often broke the bounds of orthodoxy, at times extending to the rejection of all norms, while a great many of the clergy themselves led a dissolute, worldly life. Social unrest and war aggravated the situation. The desire to retreat into the self, to find a safe haven, was everywhere palpable. The contested ways of the Beguines had already offered one possibility, a way that did not require women to retreat either to the individual solitude of the recluse or to the cloistered life of the nun.

At the origin of this new religious transformation—in a way quite analogous to the eremitic congregations discussed above—stood one particularly charismatic figure: Geert Groote (1340–1384), who like so many earlier leaders of religious movements (Norbert of Xanten, for example) experienced a sharp conversion to a more religious life.²⁹ As the son of a wealthy cloth merchant in Deventer, he had enjoyed an excellent education and was able at the University of Paris to study deeply in the liberal arts, in law, medicine, and theology, ultimately attaining the rank of Master in the Faculty of Arts. While steeped in this worldly life, he encountered two figures who had embraced the eremitic life and who would change his life dramatically.

The first was Jan van Ruysbroeck (1293/94–1381), the priest, mystic, and author of numerous works of spiritual instruction who had retreated with three companions to the solitude of Groenendaal southeast of Brussels and there founded a community that observed the Rule of Augustine.³⁰ The second was Henry Eger of Kalkar (1328–1408), also a mystic and author of numerous treatises, among them the Mirror of Sinners (Speculum peccatorum), which was destined to have considerable influence on Groote’s new form of piety.³¹

Henry Eger was prior of the Charterhouse of Monnikhuizen near Arnhem. In 1374 he invited Groote to live for a time in his monastery, in the silence of the Charterhouse, but without taking religious vows. Groote gave up his prebends and accepted the invitation, but before doing so he did something unusual: he donated his parents’ house in Deventer to a group of God-seeking women as a kind of protective space for a life in community, one also lived without vows. Groote himself stayed for many years in the Charterhouse and while there developed the leitmotif he would later hand on to the followers gathered around him. It rested on the opposition between propositum and votum. Decisive for Groote was the propositum alone—the personal intention to devote one’s life to God, the single-minded aim of following the “rule of rules,” the Gospel. In contrast, the vow—in formal legal terms the eternally binding oath of the religious—was meaningless in Groote’s eyes. An inner commitment of the heart stood here against an institutional obligation that was usually binding even when the will to fulfill it had long since faded. Decisive for Groote’s model of piety was the struggle for spiritual perfection by way of an inward elevation of the soul to God. In his own day, and especially among his followers as they developed it in the early fifteenth century, this perspective came to be called Devotio moderna.³² Its means were twofold: on the one hand, inner contemplation, meditation, or spiritual consciousness, which cultivated a religious sensibility similar to mysticism; on the other, training of the soul through a life and labor that were practical and pleasing to God.

This kind of personally shaped piety was not first developed among the Beguines. In principle, it had been a part of every search for individual faith and had already found strikingly analogous expressions both in early Franciscan circles and in the charismatic communities of the eremitic movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. So it was that the followers of Stephen of Obazine, who (as was discussed above) lived only by internalizing oral teachings on humility, obedience, poverty, and steadfast love, could see themselves as “veterans of the heavenly militia”—yet with no obligations to vows or other legally established norms.

Nevertheless, Groote sought to give his Devotio moderna enough of an institutional form to ensure that his followers could live undisturbed by threats and prohibitions. The recent fate of the Beguines cast a threatening shadow. In 1379 he established at his parents’ house a settlement for the “Sisters of the Common Life,”³³ who were to live without vows, observing only the commands of chastity and obedience under the supervision of a prioress, to sustain themselves by the work of their own hands,³⁴ and to live a pious life of contemplation and prayer. This house in Deventer would soon lead to a number of similar communities.

Groote had himself consecrated as a deacon so that he could preach. He made his way through the cities as a penitential preacher, called for the imitation of Christ, denounced the moral dissolution of his day, and criticized the property of monks and the simoniacal corruption of the clergy. And like so many of the wandering preachers who had been his predecessors, his ways inspired the fierce resistance of the bishop, who in 1383 withdrew Groote’s license to preach. But Groote had already found another outlet for his energy, one that would lead incrementally to the foundation of a monastery along the lines of traditional religious life. From around 1380, a group of men—mostly young laymen and clerics—had slowly begun to gather around him, without any organization or episcopal approval, seeking to share in his life of piety. He put them to work, instructing them not only to meditate on spiritual texts but also to copy them and to meet their needs by selling them.³⁵ Inner self-examination, combined with engaged activity toward that same end, would lead to a deepening of personal piety. Groote also gathered this group into a community without vows, calling them the Brothers of the Common Life.³⁶

Shortly before the end of his life, however, Groote resolved to establish a religious community bound by a rule. This was a notable turn that seemed to contradict his previous stance toward an institutionalized vita religiosa. His model was the convent of his father figure Jan van Ruysbroeck in Groenendaal, where regular canons lived according to the Rule of Augustine, which had so strongly emphasized daily life in community. But in 1384, the plague carried Groote away. It fell to his friend Florens Radewijns (1350–1400) to realize the plan.

With the help of the brotherhood in Deventer, the construction of a modest monastery was begun in Windesheim near Zwolle in 1387.³⁷ The first six members, who had solemnly sworn to observe the Rule of Augustine and called themselves regular canons, moved in soon after. In 1395 Boniface IX, the pope of the Roman obedience (in the age of the Great Schism, with an antipope in Avignon), approved the community and two daughter houses. In the following decades, alongside the communities of women and men who lived without vows, the Windesheimers quickly developed a remarkably widespread congregation. At around the middle of the fifteenth century, it numbered thirty houses, and by 1464 some sixty-eight male and thirteen female communities had long since expanded beyond the Low Countries into northern Germany, Alsace, Switzerland, and Bavaria. Their growth involved not only the founding of new houses but also the takeover and reform of old ones, including the venerable community of Rebdorf near Eichstätt (in modern Upper Bavaria), established in 1156.

The Windesheim congregation was attractive not only because it so strongly embraced the Devotio moderna but also because its intensely personal form of piety was now anchored in the stabilizing framework of rule-bound, life-long commitment to religious community.³⁸ This protected space allowed such great and spiritually strong personalities as Thomas of Kempen (1380–1471) to achieve deep mystical contemplation and to write his Imitation of Christ (De imitatione Christi)—a book that was long second only to the Bible as the most widely circulated spiritual work in all of Christendom.³⁹

Because the Windesheimers also knew how best to make use of all the constitutional tools available since the days of the Cistercians (especially regular general chapters and networks of mutual visitation), in this regard—apart from a few exceptions like the Premonstratensians and the congregation of Arrouaise—they achieved an organizational efficiency far superior to that of the isolated regular canonries of the previous era.

The Revelations of Birgitta

Apart from the movements among communities of hermits and regular canons described thus far, during the later Middle Ages the spirit of the old Benedictine world also found the strength, in a single instance, to produce a form of religious life that was new in both spirit and structure. In this case there was no need for the Rule of Saint Benedict itself but rather for a rule that claimed to bring forth a renewed monastic life. The origin of this remarkable development was along one of the most distant borders of Christendom, in Sweden.⁴⁰

The noble widow Birgitta (1303–1373) lived for years in the Cistercian abbey of Alvastra (Östergötland) after the death of her husband in 1344.⁴¹ While there, by her own testimony, she began to receive revelations from Christ, which the Cistercians wrote down. Among these revelations was a rule for an order that would consist of double houses dedicated to the Savior. Again and again, for the rest of her life, Birgitta advanced this issue before every figure of authority, all the way to the pope. She later came before Pope Urban V and in 1370 set forth her claim that she was to obey this command of Christ, as it had been recorded in her revelations: “Go there and say to him [the pope] that for my part I [Christ] have given you the rule of the order, which should be established and begun in the place called Vadstena in Sweden.”⁴²

For Birgitta, all religious rules were divine in origin, as one passage in her Revelations makes emphatically clear. In the text Christ himself speaks:

The Rule that this Francis introduced was not dictated or composed by human intellect and sagacity but by me in accordance with my will. Each word written in it was inspired in him by my spirit, and later he presented and offered the rule to others. So, too, all other rules which my friends have introduced, keeping and observing them themselves, teaching and offering them to others to good effect: they were neither dictated nor composed by their own human intellects and wisdom but by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.⁴³

Yet Birgitta was convinced that the rule revealed to her had now to be put into practice, in order to hold up a newly flowering religious life before the different forms of the old—all of which seemed defeated and which no longer obeyed their old rules. Only then could religious life set itself aright. Already the prologue of the Rule invoked the biblical allegory of the “Lord’s vineyard” (e.g., Isa 5, Matt 20:1-16): the servants of the king had found in his vineyards only weeds and very few vines, so the lord commanded a new vineyard to be built. He himself would “watch over it, so that everything harmful that grew there would wither, decay, rot, and become harmless, and so that the wine would be all the more strong and sweet.” “But from this vineyard,” the text continued, “many vineyards long barren will be renewed, and each will begin to bear fruit according to the day of its renewal.”⁴⁴

In light of such conviction, Birgitta was not to be denied an extraordinary sense of mission. Never before in what had now become the long history of the monastic world had such an exalted and divinely inspired claim to save religious life as this been recorded in the text of a rule itself. Perhaps it was the view from Christendom’s borders that fostered this perspective, along with its sharp criticisms of established orders and their observances.⁴⁵ Yet Birgitta also knew much of Europe’s heartland well, having traveled with her husband as far as Galicia, to the tomb of Saint James. Her experiences from her travels were no doubt decisive in shaping her point of view.

The impulse for shaping Birgitta’s rule came from the Benedictine and Cistercian traditions.⁴⁶ A monk from Alvastra had accompanied her and her husband on their pilgrimage to Santiago. The rule was written in that monastery, and the prior of Alvastra, Petrus Olavi, later expanded it by way of statutes modeled on the Cistercian tradition. A characteristic element in the rule is the remark that in uncertain circumstances, the Rule of Saint Benedict and the Carta caritatis, which contemporaries considered to be a rule written by Bernard, were always to be consulted.

And yet the rule that is woven into Birgitta’s revelations has a character all its own. All of its formulations regarding clothing, the Divine Office, silence, enclosure, and fasting reveal both a certain prudence and also the kind of zeal that could only arise from the depths of mystical experience. The high point of the text is its depiction of the way in which the community was to accept a new nun: the bishop was first to consecrate the clothing of the one who was to enter, then to set a crown atop her black veil, put a golden ring on her finger, and hand her over to the abbess.⁴⁷

Birgitta did not seek to establish a convent in the way customary for the mendicant orders or among congregations of hermits. Rather, she sought an enclosed monastery whose members were permanently bound to one place (stabilitas loci) and led not by those elected only for limited terms but by an abbess, who in the Benedictine sense held her office from God for life. The monastery sheltered two distinct communities, one of nuns and the other of ordained monks.⁴⁸ The latter were led by a “general confessor” (a prior), but all were subject to the ultimate authority of the abbess.

The total number of the community was restricted to the symbolic number of eighty-five: thirteen priests, corresponding to the apostles (counting those later chosen, Matthias and Paul), four deacons, eight lay brothers, and sixty nuns. The last three groups totaled seventy-two—the number of Christ’s disciples. The community thus represented the family gathered around the Savior, with the men fulfilling their priestly duties both for the women and for those in the surrounding area, while the women dedicated themselves to prayer, intercession, and domestic work. The local bishop held authority over the community as a whole, because Birgitta never sought episcopal exemption.⁴⁹

The layout of the monastery reflected the nature of the double community. The priests’ house (curia) was not to be built next to the women’s house (monasterium). A wall separated the two areas. Into it was set a room that allowed the priests to hear the confessions of the strictly enclosed nuns and that also served as a conference room for the coordination of the affairs of the entire complex. Both groups had their own entrances to the church. The nuns’ choir was located in an upper gallery and the priests’ choir below, by the altar.

Yet a first monastery—as the revelations had foreseen, it was in Vadstena, in southwest Sweden—would only be approved after some time. In 1349 Birgitta set out for Rome to seek approval of the “Rule of the Savior.”⁵⁰ But the well-known decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council stood against her intentions, and her request was refused. Despite that failure, however, she remained in the Eternal City and there gained in reputation as a holy woman. She became one of the principal voices among those calling for the popes to return from their exile in Avignon to the city of Peter and Paul, and after two decades, in 1370, she finally won at least a partial success. Pope Urban V, who between 1367 and 1370 resided in Rome instead of Avignon, gave her permission to establish two distinct communities in Vadstena—but both were to abide by the Rule of Augustine (which had slowly become something of a wild card in the establishment of institutional norms for religious life) along with further specific guidelines from Birgitta’s own pen.⁵¹

Birgitta died in July 1373. In 1378 her daughter Catherine was able to win approval of the rule from Pope Urban VI, albeit in a modified form, as revised constitutions that were clothed in the mantle of the Augustinian rule.⁵² In this version it was no longer Christ himself who spoke; he was only spoken of in the third person. A text of revelation shaped by the deepest piety had evolved into a legal text geared toward practical adaptation to circumstance.

In any case, these legal constructions, which changed nothing essential in the founding concepts of the organization, fostered the emergence of a new monastic congregation, known as the “Order of the Savior” (Ordo Sanctissimi Salvatoris) or, as it was often called, the “Birgittine Order.”⁵³ Despite the structure of its communities, which was often difficult to realize, by 1500 the Order claimed some twenty-seven houses, most of them concentrated in Germany, and especially in its northwestern territories, in Bavaria, and on the Baltic coast, but with others in England, Norway, Sweden (where Vadstena remained the congregation’s center), Finland, Poland, and Italy.⁵⁴

The monastery church of Vadstena is the former center of the Order of the Birgittines.

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¹ Marco Rainini, “I predicatori dei tempi ultimi. La rielaborazione di un tema escatologico nel costruirsi dell’identità profetica dell’ordine domenicano,” Cristianesimo nella storia 23 (2002): 307–44, here 335–36.

² Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 150–53.

³ Vincentius Bellovacensis, Speculum historiale (Douai, 1624; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1965), 1324–25.

⁴ Gian Luca Potestà, Il tempo dell’Apocalisse. Vita di Gioacchino da Fiore (Rome: Edizioni Laterza, 2004).

⁵ On the dating of the “Expositio super Hieremiam,” see Reeves, Influence of Prophecy, 56. See also Emmett Randolph Daniel, Abbot Joachim of Fiore and Joachimism: Selected Articles (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2011).

⁶ Reeves, Influence of Prophecy, 133–292.

⁷ Kaspar Elm, “Verfall und Erneuerung des Ordenswesens im Spätmittelalter,” in Untersuchungen zu Kloster und Stift (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), 188–238. English trans. in James D. Mixson, trans., Selected Essays of Kaspar Elm (Leiden: Brill, 2015), chap. 4.

⁸ On exemplary structures, see Anne Müller, “Managing Crises: Institutional Restabilisation of the Religious Orders in England after the Black Death (1347–1350),” Revue Mabillon 16 (2005): 205–19.

⁹ On exemplary structures, see Anselme Dimier, “La grande pitié des monastères cisterciens de France pendant la guerre de Cent Ans,” in Mélanges à la mémoire du père Anselme Dimier, ed. Benoît Chauvin (Arbois: Chauvin, 1982), 1:540–44.

¹⁰ On the following, see Gabor Sarbak, “Entstehung und Frühgeschichte des Ordens der Pauliner,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 99 (1988): 93–103; Beatrix Fülöpp-Romhányi, “Die Pauliner im mittelalterlichen Ungarn,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte des Paulinerordens, ed. Kaspar Elm (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000), 143–56; Maria-Elisabeth Brunert, “Die Pauliner. Zu den Ursprüngen ihres Ordens, seiner Geschichte und Spiritualität,” in Klosterforschung: Befunde, Projekte, Perspektiven, ed. Jens Schneider (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), 11–39; Gabor Sarbak, ed., Der Paulinerorden. Geschichte—Geist—Kultur (Budapest: S. István Társulat, 2010).

¹¹ On the following, with all of the evidence, see Sarbak, “Entstehung und Frühgeschichte,” 101–2.

¹² Gabor Sarbak, “Das Buch- und Bibliothekswesen der Pauliner im Mittelalter,” in Elm, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Paulinerordens, 41–62.

¹³ Kaspar Elm, “Elias, Paulus von Theben und Augustinus als Ordensgründer: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichtsschreibung und der Geschichtsdeutung des Eremiten- und Bettelordens des 13. Jahrhunderts,” in Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewußtsein im späten Mittelalter, ed. Hans Patze (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1987), 371–99, here 375–81. In English, “Elijah, Paul of Thebes, and Augustine: Fundatores Ordinum: A Contribution to the Historical Self-understanding of Medieval Religious Orders,” Augustinian Heritage 36 (1990): 163–82.

¹⁴ For an overview, see Giorgio Picasso, ed., Il monachesimo italiano nel secolo della grande crisi (Cesena: Badia di Santa Maria del Monte, 2004).

¹⁵ Giovanni Spinelli, “Silvestriner,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters (Munich: Artemis, 1995) 7:1909–10.

¹⁶ On the following, see Robert Folz, “Le monastère du Val des Choux au premier siècle de son histoire,” Bulletin philologique et historique (jusqu’à 1610) du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. Section de Philologie et d’histoire, année 1959 (1960): 91–115.

¹⁷ Phillip Carl Adamo, “The Manuscript Tradition and Origins of the Caulite Customary: An Historiographic Examination,” Revue Mabillon 72 (2000): 197–220.

¹⁸ Peter Herde, Cölestin V. (1294), Peter von Morrone, Der Engelpapst. Mit einem Urkundenanhang und Edition zweier Viten (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1981); Roberto Rusconi, “Celestiniana: dal santo eremita al santo papa,” Sanctorum 7 (2010): 109–29; Alessandra Bartolomei Romagnoli, Una memoria controversa. Celestino V e le sue fonti (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2013).

¹⁹ On the following, see Karl Borchardt, Die Cölestiner (Husum: Matthiesen, 2006), 13–33.

²⁰ Tommaso Leccisotti, Abbazia di Montecassino. I regesti dell’archivio, vol. 3, Fondo di S. Spirito del Morrone (Rome: Pisani, 1966), 31–32.

²¹ Edited in Borchardt, Die Cölestiner, 375–77.

²² Borchardt, Die Cölestiner, 171–218.

²³ Peter Herde, “Cölestin V. ‘Der Engelpapst,’” in Gestalten der Kirchengeschichte, ed. Martin Greschat (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1983), 1:244–46.

²⁴ Giorgio Picasso, “La spiritualità dell’antico monachesimo alle origini di Monte Oliveto,” in Charisma und religiöse Gemeinschaften im Mittelalter, ed. Giancarlo Andenna et al. (Münster: LIT, 2005), 443–52; Luigi Gioia, San Bernardo Tolomei e lo spirito della famiglia monastica di Monte Oliveto (Siena: Abbazia di Monte Oliveto, 2009).

²⁵ John Roger Loxdale Highfield, “The Jeronimites in Spain, Their Patrons and Success, 1373–1516,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 34 (1983): 513–33; see also Timothy J. Schmitz, “The Spanish Jeronymites and the Reformed Texts of the Council of Trent,” Sixteenth Century Journal 37 (2006): 375–99.

²⁶ Constitutiones oder Satzungen des Eremiten-Ordens S. Hieronymi, Congregationis Des Seeligen Petri von Pisa, Der strengern Observanz (Munich, 1744).

²⁷ Alessandro Maria Galuzzi, Origini dell’Ordine dei Minimi (Rome: Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1967).

²⁸ Dominique Dinet, “L’installation et la diffusion des Minimes en France,” in Saint François de Paule et les Minimes en France de la fin du XVe au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Pierre Benoist and André Vauchez (Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2010), 13–22.

²⁹ On the following, see Georgette Épiney-Burgard, Gérard Grote (1340–1384) et les débuts de la Dévotion Moderne (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1970); Susanne Krauss, Die Devotio moderna in Deventer (Münster: LIT, 2007), 40–43.

³⁰ Kurt Ruh, “Jan van Ruusbroec. Versuch einer Würdigung von Person und Werk,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 125 (1996): 1–50.

³¹ Heinrich Rüthing, Der Kartäuser Heinrich Egher von Kalkar 1328–1408 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967).

³² Krauss, Die Devotio moderna, 329–93; John van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2008); Dick E. H. de Boer and Iris Kwiatkowski, eds., Die Devotio moderna. Sozialer und kultureller Transfer (1350–1580), 2 vols. (Münster: Aschendorff, 2013).

³³ On the houses of the sisters, see Krauss, Die Devotio moderna, 91–144.

³⁴ Martina B. Klug, Armut und Arbeit in der Devotio moderna: Studien zum Leben der Schwestern in niederrheinischen Gemeinschaften (Munich: Waxmann, 2005).

³⁵ Nikolaus Staubach, “Text als Prozeß. Zur Pragmatik des Schreibens und Lesens in der Devotio moderna,” in Pragmatische Dimensionen mittelalterlicher Schriftkultur, ed. Christel Meier (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), 251–76.

³⁶ On their houses, see Nikolaus Staubach, ed., Kirchenreform von unten. Gerhard Zerbolt von Zutphen und die Brüder vom gemeinsamen Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005); Susanne Krauss, Die Devotio moderna, 196–228.

³⁷ On the following, see Stephan Acht, “Die Windesheimer Augustinerchorherren-Kongregation gestern und heute,” in Die Augustinerchorherren in Bayern, ed. Paul Mai (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 1999), 57–60.

³⁸ Sönke Lorenz, “Zu Spiritualität und Theologie bei der Windesheimer Kongregation,” in Frömmigkeit und Theologie an Chorherrenstiften, ed. Ulrich Köpf (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2009), 169–84.

³⁹ Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi libri quatuor, ed. Tiburzio Lupo (Città del Vaticano: Libreria editrice Vaticana, 1982); Nikolaus Staubach, “Von der Nachfolge Christi und ihren Folgen: Oder warum wurde Thomas von Kempen so berühmt?” in Kempener Thomas-Vorträge, ed. Ulrike Bodemann (Kempen: Thomas-Archiv, 2002), 85–104.

⁴⁰ Tore Nyberg, “Der Birgittenorden als Beispiel einer Neugründung im Zeitalter der Ordensreformen,” in Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen, ed. Kaspar Elm (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), 373–96.

⁴¹ On the following, see Günther Schiwy, Birgitta von Schweden. Mystikerin und Visionärin des späten Mittelalters. Eine Biographie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003).

⁴² Sanctae Birgittae Revelaciones, ed. Birger Bergh et al. (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967–2002), here Revelaciones 4.137; trans. from Leben und Offenbarungen der heiligen Brigitta, nach der Übersetzung von Ludwig Clarus (1888), digitalized and rev. Gertrud Willy; http://www.joerg-sieger.de/isenheim/brigitta/b_03.html; English trans. Denis Michael Searby, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006–2012), here 2:247.

⁴³ Revelaciones 7.20; trans. Searby, 3:247.

⁴⁴ Revelaciones, Regula I.2; trans. Searby 4:123–47.

⁴⁵ Pavlína Rychterová, “Kirchenkritische Visionen der hl. Birgitta von Schweden und ihre Übersetzung von Thomas von Štítný,” in Pater familias: Sborník prispevku k životnímu jubileu Prof. Dr. Ivana Hlavácka, ed. Jan Hrdina (Prague: Scriptorium, 2002), 357–80.

⁴⁶ Helmut Schatz, “Heimweh nach der Urkirche: Brigitta von Schweden und ihr Orden im Umkreis der Zisterzienser,” Cistercienser Chronik 110 (2003): 237–42.

⁴⁷ Tore Nyberg, Birgittinische Klostergründungen des Mittelalters (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1965), 2–3.

⁴⁸ Nyberg, Birgittinische Klostergründungen, 32–42.

⁴⁹ Nyberg, Birgittinische Klostergründungen, 59–63.

⁵⁰ Pavlína Rychterová, Die Offenbarungen der heiligen Birgitta von Schweden. Eine Untersuchung zur alttschechischen Übersetzung des Thomas von Štítné (um 1330–um 1409) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 38–43.

⁵¹ Nyberg, Birgittinische Klostergründungen, 43–46.

⁵² Nyberg, Birgittinische Klostergründungen, 49–59.

⁵³ Tore Nyberg, “Die Entwicklung der Statuten des Brigittenordens bis 1420,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung 75 (1989): 202–27.

⁵⁴ Nyberg, Birgittinische Klostergründungen, 69–222.