Beginning in the 1380s in the east-central Netherlands and in the county of Holland, the Devotio Moderna formed households organized as communes and forged lives centred on private devotion. This book places the movement in the context of urban society in the medieval Low Countries.

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.

This book presents a lost tradition of inner work, the way of the householder, which was believed by the Brotherhood of Common Life to have been the teaching of the Apostles. It focuses on the emergence, amidst the decay of medieval culture, of "the mixed life," this reconciliation of action and contemplation, as the essential link between Catholic spirituality and Protestantism. The transmission of this work to lay persons seeking the interior dimensions of their lives without withdrawing from the world is presented. The hitherto monastic spiritual exercises for strengthening attention are discussed in depth. The traditional and vital Christian knowledge of the human condition, which the Brothers and Sisters verified for themselves, is emphasized, especially the crucial significance of the force of attention in the recollection of oneself and God. The importance of strengthening attentive awareness is everywhere alluded to in the sources, but virtually ignored in current accounts of the Christian heritage. The book traces a transmission of spiritual exercises supported by a strongpsychological base that is strangely familiar to the climate of today's search for meaning.

Here are basic texts that reveal the spirituality of the Modern Devout, especially during the early years of the movement from 1380 to 1430. The "Modern Devotion" movement, which was originated by a Dutchman, Master Geerte Grote, is the classic expression of later medieval religious life.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER When they were kids in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1950s, Diane Keaton and her younger brother, Randy, were best friends and companions. But as they grew up, Randy became troubled, then reclusive. Before he was thirty, he was divorced, an alcoholic, a man who couldn’t hold on to full-time work—his life a world away from his sister’s, and from the rest of their family. Now Diane delves into the nuances of their shared, and separate, pasts to confront the difficult question of why and how Randy ended up living his life on “the other side of normal.” In beautiful and fearless prose intertwined with journal entries, letters, and poetry—much of it Randy’s own—and supplemented by personal photographs and artwork, this insightful, heartfelt memoir contemplates the inner workings of a family, the ties of love and responsibility that hold it together, and the special bond between siblings—even those who are pulled far apart.

The Brethren of the Common Life was a religious organization in the Netherlands founded by Gerhard Groot in the last quarter of the fourteenth century. Groot was a lay preacher who spoke out against corruption and declining spirituality within the Church. The majority of the Brethren were laymen who devoted themselves to doing charitable work, nursing the sick, studying and teaching the Scriptures, and copying religious and inspirational works. They founded a number of schools that became famous for their high standards of learning. Many famous men attended their schools, including Nicholas of Cusa, Thomas a Kempis, and Erasmus, all of whom studied at the Brethren's school at Deventer. The Brethren's undogmatic form of piety became known as the 'devotio moderna' or 'new devotion' - a form which some historians have argued helped to pave the road for the Protestant Reformation.