Communicating Devotion in the Late Medieval Low Countries
The 'Collationes' of the Brothers of the Common Life
Hardback (Forthcoming)
(December 2026)
ISBN: 9782503625041
Price: $100.00
A new perspective on shared reading practices between laypeople and religious professionals in the late medieval Low Countries.
On Sundays and feast days, the Brothers of the Common Life organised their so-called collationes: students and other interested laypeople were invited to visit their house and listen to a devout text being read in the vernacular. With these meetings, they were given an idea of what important religious figures like Augustine, Bernard, or Chrysostom had said on a given topic. But the collatio was not simply a top-down communication of knowledge: participants were actively involved in the process as well, shaping the reading as well as the texts. The Brothers maintained close personal ties with their lay visitors in order to most effectively communicate their message. In doing so, people outside of the Modern Devout movement were offered a model to start reading in the way the Brothers read. They not only learned which texts were of importance, but also how they should be read and subsequently used. They were instructed on how to combine quotations and excerpts to find new and relevant insights. In the collatio, visitors were offered a glimpse into the Brothers’ own library, with an open invitation to join their textual community. Through informal talks guided by selected readings, the spirit of the Modern Devotion was thus communicated to an urban lay audience. This study explores a medieval devotional practice — the collatio — at the crossroads of oral and textual communication and provides a new perspective on late medieval devotional culture and on the Brothers of the Common Life.
Other Titles in this Series
Sins of the Tongue in the Medieval West
Sinful, Unethical, and Criminal Words in Middle Dutch (1300-1550)
Volume 36
Strategies of Writing
Studies on Text and Trust in the Middle Ages: Papers from Trust in Writing in the Middle Ages (Utrecht, 28-29 November 2002)
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Styles et pratiques de lecture: Analyses comparees des traditions orales et ecrites au Moyen Age / Styles and Practices of Reading: Comparative Analyses of Oral and Written Traditions in the Middle Ages
Volume 26
Looking Back from the Invention of Printing
Mothers and the Teaching of Reading in the Middle Ages
Volume 40
Medieval Women in Letters
Letters by Women, to Women, and about Women in Medieval Literatures
Volume 66
Manuscript Communication
Visual and Textual Mechanics of Communication in Hagiographical Texts from the Southern Low Countries, 900-1200
Volume 32
Writing Names in Medieval Sacred Spaces
Inscriptions in the West, from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages
Volume 56
Literacy in Medieval and Early Modern Vilnius
Forms of Writing and Rhetorical Spaces in the City
Volume 55