United States or Kiribati ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
Another of his followers founded the celebrated monastery of Windesheim, where, half a century later, the Imitation of Christ was written.
Goswin Tyasen, who afterward became a Canon Regular at Windesheim, assisted him in this business, for he, relying upon the goodness of God, and having the ear of his fellows, was eagerly desirous to move them to choose this place.
To observe one another with sympathy, to watch and note each other's inner life, was a customary and approved occupation among the brethren of the Common Life and the Windesheim monks. And though Steyn and Sion were not of the Windesheim congregation, the spirit of the devotio moderna was prevalent there.
In the beginning of the fifteenth century the house of Augustinian canons at Windesheim near Zwolle instituted for itself a new and stricter set of statutes, and soon gathered round it nearly a hundred houses of both sexes, forming the Windesheim Congregation: besides which, other monasteries bound themselves into smaller bodies to observe the new statutes.
Mary's at Sion, near Delft, to which his brother Peter belonged, and St. Michael's at Hem, near Schoonhoven. The fame of Windesheim spread into France. In two successive years 1496, 7 parties were invited thence to reform French Benedictine houses. The first, headed by John Mauburn of Brussels, was brought in by the Abbot of St. Severinus' at Château-Landon near Fontainebleau.
The second mission, though promoted by influential men in Paris, had less result. St. Victor's, the Benedictine Abbey which the Bishop of Paris wished to reform, was one of the most important in his diocese; and its inmates were averse from the proposed changes. For nine months the mission from Windesheim sat in Paris, expounding, demonstrating, hoping to persuade.
Word Of The Day