Beginning in the 1380s, in market towns along the IJssel River (east-central Netherlands) and in the county of Holland, groups of women and men formed households organized as communes and a lifestyle centered on devotion. They lived on city streets alongside urban neighbors, managed properties and rents in common, and prepared textiles or books for local markets—all the while refusing to profess vows as religious or to acquire spouses and property as lay citizens. They defended their lifestyle, self-designed, as exemplary, and sustained it in the face of opposition, the women labeled “beguines,” the men “lollards,” epithets meant to...

Geert Grote of Deventer (b. 1340) spent his first thirty-four years, to mid-life by medieval standards, in pursuit of a clerical career, inquisitive about learning, eager for office and income, restlessly underway. The only legitimate heir of patrician parents, orphaned at ten by the plague, he went to Paris in his midteens, earned his master’s beret in 1358, and stayed on as a regent master in arts. From age twenty-two he applied repeatedly to the curia at Avignon for church incomes (1362, 1363, 1365, 1366, 1371). Named in 1362 the “most celebrated” of those supplicating that year from the English...

Unlike his father and uncles before him who sought profit at trade and advantage in politics, Master Geert Grote of Deventer poured his energy into converting fellow citizens. People marveled that a man of learning and connections should give up goods and prestige for a self-imposed pursuit of souls. He preached in squares before town churches, sending an assistant ahead to post broadsheets, sometimes carrying books around in a barrel to refute critics. At Zwolle, where Grote stayed with his mother’s family, a prominent citizen confronted him: “Why, Master, do you trouble us, and introduce new customs? Stop this preaching,...

So many new converts appearing in such a short time stirred up talk of “zealots” and “beguines.” How widespread that talk was, how dangerous, how merely mocking, is hard to discern from this historical distance. For twenty years nonetheless their status—exactly the bishop’s word (super statu quarundam personarum nostre dyocesis)—hung in the balance.¹ The Modern-Day Devout remembered it as harrowing. Tempting as it may be to reduce these clashes to broad binaries (clergy versus laity, authorities versus Free Spirits, men versus women), these disputes played out locally and in all varying combinations, with allies and adversaries face-to-face in...

The way of the convert, so Grundmann held, was to be co-opted or marginalized, become a professed religious or a heretic. In actual practice, Elm argued back, converts found their way to various options outside heresy or religion, as beguines, hospice workers, or recluses, all forms of life that also gained recognized standing in medieval society.¹ This view, though not wrong, fails to account for real pressure brought to bear on beguines and the Devout, indeed on nearly any new or unusual form of converted life.² For women in high-profile cases such as Birgitta of Sweden the line separating canonization...

The late medieval church was big business. Extensive material holdings and a vast clergy made it collectively the largest land-holder and employer in Europe. In the fourteenth century papal ideologues articulated theoretical claims to it all as one great monarchical state. In actuality clerical land and office came complexly interwoven with lay and princely powers, and clergy remained inextricably linked to local families, the web of interests, and of competition, labyrinthine. Princes funded churches while exercising patronage and skimming income; clerical office funded princely administration. Ecclesiastical banking enriched prelates as well as bankers, and also greased the economy at large....

Religion in the Middle Ages was public. New forms of conversion almost inevitably provoked fresh arguments over what was permissible: what practices or teachings stretched the boundaries of the licit, what forms of religion could be recognized without infringing upon the rights of others, what rulings (or inquisitorial interventions) narrowed the range of the possible. Participation in this debate hinged as much on society as church, on social and educational status as well as gender and kinship. But lines also ran crooked. In the majority Christian religion any person might potentially be recognized as gifted with a divine calling or...

The Modern-Day Devout invoked canon law to defend their way of life, copied books for a living, oversaw young students, sometimes taught basic Latin arts, kept scrapbooks to aid their spiritual lives—all with inventiveness. But they were wary of theology. For them it meant idle speculation. They were book-men by trade, and temptation lay in losing their heads in scholastic disputation. Grote dismissed theologians as thinking carnally (carnaliter), their arguments oriented to show or ambition or intellectual self-satisfaction. Florens too repudiated books of learned speculation and focused on devotional books. When the men’s society in Deventer rebuilt their house...

The Modern-Day Devout aimed ultimately to build souls, not structures or theologies. Their tone was intense and practical: a call for people to convert, make progress, eliminate one vice after another, add virtue to virtue, never leave off examining the self. This was the way to purity of heart and peace with God, conceived not as rapturous union but as a confident quietude in the dread presence of the divine. The Devout shared certain assumptions with townspeople and clergy, including that life at its best was not endurance or giving in to fate but looked toward progress (profectus). At issue,...

To passersby in fifteenth-century Netherlandish towns, the Modern-Day Devout might have looked on occasion like an overgrown artisanal household laboring at textiles or book-making, or a religious house with its life inside focused on liturgical prayer and collective discipline, or a parish house offering townspeople and students preaching and spiritual guidance. Each perception had truth in it. Yet Devout households were none of these, at least not exactly, and that puzzled contemporaries, sometimes irritating them. To the inquisitor they looked like a sect, a conventicle in flagrant violation of papal law. To friars the Modern-Day Devout looked like a self-made...