The Devotio Moderna and Practical Mysticism

The Devotio Moderna, or "Modern Devotion," originated with Geert Groote (1340–1384), a wealthy cleric from Deventer in the Low Countries who studied arts and law at the University of Paris before undergoing a profound religious conversion around 1374, prompted in part by contact with the Carthusian monk Henry Eger of Kalkar. Groote subsequently renounced much of his worldly life, took up itinerant preaching against clerical abuses under a license as a deacon, and gathered around himself a community of laypeople and clerics in Deventer committed to a shared life of manual and intellectual labor, communal property, and intensive personal devotion, without taking formal religious vows, forming the nucleus of what became known as the Brothers (and, in parallel houses, Sisters) of the Common Life.