Brethren of the Common Life

Sure.

There was a, there was a education movement in the Middle Ages called, uh, Brethren of the Common Life, and, uh, um, an order of, uh, monks, and they were big into education.

And they found, uh, they founded schools.

So the, um, Thomas à Kempis, uh, who wrote Imitation of Christ, was from that, uh, movement, the Brethren of the Common Life.

Um, and so, who...

You know, who, who has heard of these guys? Well, not very many, unless you're into church history.

You've got the Hussites.

You've got the Brethren of Common Life, Gerhard of Grote.

I mean, these are reforming movements.

They come along and they realize that the hearts of the people have grown cold.

The Northern Netherlands, outskirts in every sense.

Movement of Devotio Moderna, Brethren of the Common Life, and Vitisheim Monasteries.

Erasmus' birth, fourteen sixty-six.

His relations and name.

There was yet another characteristic spiritual phenomenon, which originated here and gave its peculiar stamp to life in these countries.

It was a movement designed to give depth and fervor to religious life, started by a burgher of Deventer, Gert Groot, toward the end of the 14th century.

It had embodied itself in two closely connected forms, the freighter houses, where the brethren of the common life lived together without altogether separating from the world, and the congregation of the monastery at Wijdesheim of the order of the regular Augustinian canons.

Originating in the regions on the banks of the IJssel, 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.

He went to the local school in Mansfeld until he was 14.

Then he went to Magdeburg, where he spent a year in the school of the Brethren of the Common Life.

It's quite surprising that he barely mentioned this institution.

The Brethren were a community of lay people who tried to live in the footsteps of the Apostles.