Any historical period called “late” is headed for interpretive trouble, and one called “late medieval” is probably doomed.Footnote ¹ Periodization is an artifice, as we know, yet also an art. Historians have entirely reconceived “late antiquity” over the past generation, transforming Roman decadence into an imperial and Christian culture three centuries long embracing the whole Mediterranean world, creative in its culture and foundational for societies that followed. But what of “late medieval”? In most textbooks the term comes paired still with “decline.”Footnote ² Humanists and Reformers first created the artifice of a “middle time,” a dismissive gesture toward the thousand years that separated them from the golden ages of antiquity and/or the early church. Nineteenth-century scientific historians introduced art into this artifice by dividing that amorphous millennium into semi-coherent sub-periods: “early” (400–1000), “high” (1000–1300), and a rump called “late” (1300–1500). Church history entered importantly into the characterizations, with the “late” period traditionally told as a series of catastrophes beginning with destructive confrontations between Pope Boniface VIII (d. 1303) and King Philip the Fair.Footnote ³ The storyline for the two centuries that followed, whether treated as deepening darkness (traditional) or as an overripe autumn (Huizinga), depended on what came before and after. Early in the twentieth century, church historians introduced ecumenical and even ironic reversals: Catholic scholars, looking to their own reforms, conceded late medieval deviance and the need sometimes for reform; Protestant scholars, looking to a reform born of strength rather than decline, found a late Middle Ages full of flourishing religiosity and even modernizing initiatives. Others, skeptical of the Reformation as marking any decisive turn toward modernity (vs. Hegel), delighted in finding all manner of cults, relics, prophecies, and zealots still among these new Protestants.Footnote ⁴ Oberman and McGinn by contrast have reconceived the fields of theology and mysticism, Huizinga's autumnal evanescence becoming a golden harvest.Footnote ⁵ All the same—and this only a bit overstated—many Reformation histories still essentially start the world anew in the 1520s, now speaking German,Footnote ⁶ and too many medieval histories still close their story with fourteenth-century “decline,” an apocalyptic onslaught of plague, revolt, schism, and war.

That is, unless your primary interest is Chaucer's Ricardian era as marking the high point of medieval English literature or Italian humanism as the rebirth of art and learning. Then the chronology falls apart. Master Jean Gerson of Paris (d. 1431), arguably the most influential church figure in the fifteenth century, was ten years old when Petrarch and Boccaccio died (1374). Thomas of Kempen's four pamphlets called the Imitation of Christ, the most widely copied work of the fifteenth century, were composed at the same time (ca. 1420) as Leonardo Bruni's History of the Florentine People, a model for humanist historiography. We maintain discrete epochs by wearing interpretive blinkers. The fault is common to all. Medieval historians of the church have looked mainly to continuities, to institutions, theologies, practices, and devotions elaborated from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries onward, or indeed to discontinuity, evidences of decline—but not mostly to still another creative period. Renaissance historians may concede that religion was still important and much art sacred, but they incline to focus on the antique or civic or profane or material, that perceived as anticipating, or even launching, what we used to call the modern.Footnote ⁷ Reformation historians have proved more innovative of late. Eamon Duffy portrayed the fifteenth-century church in England as resplendent with “traditional religion,” his label “traditional” meaning centuries-old, contentedly churchly, and flourishing.Footnote ⁸ What he left out were contrarian critics, reforming zealots, and the indifferent. Berndt Hamm sees in fifteenth-century religion a proliferating devotional life grounded in its own theology (Frömmigkeitstheologie) along with an increased “normative centering” (normative Zentrierung), by which he means a coalescing around key themes, above all the passion along with mercy and trust, presaging in a way the “sola” formulations of the Reformers.Footnote ⁹

Interpreting the fifteenth century is not easy.Footnote ¹⁰ Great turning points in church history irrevocably re-configure our perception of what came before, and this is often reinforced by historians of lasting influence. Eusebius wrote his account of the church's first three centuries a decade after the emperor Constantine converted. Augustine dictated his learned reflections on the cities of God and man just at the point when Christians emerged as the ruling majority in Roman and then European history. The Reformation spawned in its wake rival versions of the first fifteen centuries, with Flacius and Baronius articulating Protestant and Catholic outlooks endlessly reproduced even to the present. Great turns in European church history (Roman establishment/Revolutionary dis-establishment, Reformation/de-Christianization) so whirl our lens that earlier practices and worldviews come into focus thereafter only with imaginative effort. This subsequent historicizing may alert us to what we should have seen—early Christians making their peace with Roman citizenship, non-Christians and non-standard practices a part of medieval Europe. But to do so we must peer through or around those framing histories. Few eras have suffered from this as much as fifteenth-century Europe, caught in the Catholic/Protestant polemic from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries no less than in the medieval/modern, scholastic/humanist disputes. The fifteenth century as a distinct epoch, a Europe with multiple and sometimes contradictory options, not merely autumnal or traditional or devotional or indeed humanist or pre-reforming (whatever truths those rubrics may also capture), steeped in inheritances yet productive of innovations—this historians are only beginning to imagine.Footnote ¹¹

We must try to conceive this period from within rather than as a hinge in a larger narrative. This address focuses on the 1370s to 1520s, the long fifteenth century as some now say, and more particularly on religious and church history. The dates are relative, the boundaries fluid, as always in history: Europe did not turn itself inside out in 1378 or 1520 or 1530. But dating is an issue. Rather than to approach the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries indiscriminately as overshadowed by crisis, we would do well, first, to perceive (and to bracket off) the 1280s–1350s as distinct in character and tone. In those two charged generations philosophical and exegetical theologians honed their discipline with new linguistic tools, thinkers like Porete and Eckhart pushed mystical experience and expression to new limits in the vernacular, mendicants reigned even as Franciscans splintered, private religious like beguines multiplied even under suspicion, apocalyptic prophecies proliferated, Birgit began to receive revelations, a unified papacy issued its strongest claims and encountered core challenges even while continuing to centralize at Avignon, treatises on ecclesiology first emerged, theology developed institutional depth at Paris and Oxford as did law at Bologna, and Dante was writing his Divine Comedy and a plea for secular Monarchy.Footnote ¹² This is not to deny the harsh human realities of famine in the 1310s, of endemic warfare from the 1330s, of demographic disaster beginning in 1348 and stretching to 1500. But it is to signal the power and interest of those two generations in their own right, a narrative not predetermined or centered on papal monarchy, a story yet to be written.

Our story begins in the 1370s. Almost overnight the papacy divided in two and then three, masters and prelates rethought ecclesiology again to envision participatory church governance, the teachings of Master John Wyclif at Oxford inspired a Lollard movement, the preaching of Master Geert Grote in the Low Countries gave birth to the Devotio Moderna, Catherine of Siena called on popes and laypeople to convert, zealots within religious orders demanded stricter observance, the recluse Julian of Norwich wrote down revelations in English, Langland rewrote yet again his vision of a church imagined through the eyes of a Christ-like plowman—all this and much more breaking out across Europe independently and nearly simultaneously. For the next century movements and conflicts set in motion then deeply informed church life: Observants springing up in nearly all orders as the leading exemplars of institutional holiness; humanists offering an alternative model for learning with a return to sources and moral philosophy; Lollards and Hussites battling to hang on in isolated communities; the Devotio Moderna flourishing until 1500 only to be shut down by Protestants and Catholics alike in the 1560s; new cults to Joseph and Anne alongside Roche and Sebastian (the latter two protectors against plague); new cults of the holy blood in northern Germany (also not surviving the Reformation); new Jesus-lives informing countless meditational treatises and techniques; the rosary and stations of the cross first entering common practice; and conciliarism dominating ecclesiological action and thought, frightening popes down into the 1530s. This is not to suggest that religious culture and church conflicts simply went on much the same for a century and a half. An initial constellation of these issues and tones emerged in the 1370s–1440s, a distinctive tone again in the 1480s–1520s, though within persisting continuities when we compare to what came before and after.Footnote ¹³

Nearly all these matters circulated through the councils of Constance (1414–1418) and Basel (1431–1449). As late as 1513, despite a reassertion of Roman monarchy, two Camaldolese hermits urged the Medici Pope Leo X in humanist prose to hold frequent general councils as the only effective “medicine” for an ailing “Christian republic,”Footnote ¹⁴ and in the 1520s Luther and others called for a general council to adjudicate contested matters of theology and reform. If fifteenth-century councils failed to reform the church in head and members, a standard reproach colored by the later outbreak of Reformation, it was in some sense because all interests were truly on the table and—as often in modern democracies—one party could not easily give way without a comparable yielding of privilege or income from another. New to these fifteenth-century assemblies was their historical function as communication networks and public forums.Footnote ¹⁵ Quite simply, nearly every conceivable issue or cause crisscrossed at these councils. Delegates might promote news of Birgittine revelations right alongside initiating queries into both, paradoxically, her orthodoxy and her canonization. Humanists recovered and exchanged manuscripts of old or new authors. Contemporary authors, Gerson for instance, self-consciously availed themselves of the councils to distribute and exchange texts, these all still handwritten.Footnote ¹⁶

This crisscrossing of ideas and information at councils grows in importance when juxtaposed with another key feature of this age, often noted by historians: its regionalism.Footnote ¹⁷ From roughly 1200 into the 1350s, internationalizing forces had set the general momentum, reaching ever deeper into local European church life: a centralizing curia, a common canon law, friars setting up shop in every town, university men from Paris and Bologna schooled in common texts and methods, a single avenue for canonization.Footnote ¹⁸ From the 1370s energy shifted decisively to local forces. Universities now set up regionally across Europe under princely and territorial patronage. Governments availed themselves of a divided and weakened papacy, as well as divided orders, to assert firmer control over local religious life. New religious initiatives came from regions also, now not from friars but secular masters like Geert Grote in the Low Countries, John Wyclif in Oxford, John Hus in Prague, or alternatively from inspired women like Birgit in Sweden or Catherine in Siena or Julian in Norwich or Joan in France. The mechanisms of centralism, even their accompanying expectations, nonetheless also persisted. New groups deftly turned to either according to their purposes, the Netherlandish Modern-Day Devout defending themselves successfully against a Dominican critic at Constance, then a decade later seeking papal privileges to guarantee their practices in the face of persistent critics.Footnote ¹⁹ Birgit moved to Rome, but her heirs defended her orthodoxy and pursued her canonization at council or in Rome. Hus too, naively as it turned out, journeyed to Constance to discuss and negotiate his teachings. The council at Constance burned Hus (as it condemned Wyclif), and that at Basel organized war against Hussites but also negotiated a compromise. New religious energies took a decidedly regional caste, sometimes crossed or met at general councils and dispersed across Europe, but also met their fate mostly locally. The English crown and bishops turned against Lollards, while the bishops of Utrecht, Münster, and Cologne ultimately allowed the Devotio Moderna. This was not “disfunctionality” but a new form of functioning within Christendom, now harboring multiple and sometimes contested options, whatever the limitations in a particular region, university, or religious house.

In fifteenth-century Europe this local energy came most fully and commonly to expression in the parish. Europe's grid of mother churches with font and churchyard, porch and nave, had emerged into plain view in the later twelfth century (hardly figuring yet in Gratian's Decretum of ca. 1140), curates then appearing with their title and duties in the later thirteenth. What we see in the fifteenth century, especially in England through the work of scholars like Katherine French, is the parish community itself, the churchwardens and their accounts, the fabric and its upkeep, the festivals and their organization, the marriages and their contestation.Footnote ²⁰ In parts of Germany and Switzerland we also see parish communities claiming, and exercising, a right to elect their own curate, this in itself potentially a community-forming experience.Footnote ²¹ What Duffy has described as “traditional” represents in good measure the fully emergent energies and religious consciousness of the long fifteenth-century parish. In England the Lollards as well, this too little noted, imagined a remade parish as central to true Christian life, led now by an elected poor priest; with propertied monks, sectarian friars, and overweening prelates banned, their goods handed over to the crown.Footnote ²² In the aftermath their practices and communities survived by way of “conventicles” (a hostile term), voluntary groups or ersatz parishes, in reality something like private religious societies, not necessarily underground.Footnote ²³ The Modern-Day Devout, with their communal households and public exhortations, also created a kind of alternative parish, in their case deliberately set up as a private society, that is, not a public corporation,Footnote ²⁴ as did in her way Catherine of Siena with the familia she constructed around her person.Footnote ²⁵ Master John Gerson would oppose Lollards and Hussites, but he fully shared their concern with the parish and sought to elevate the status of curates. Contrary to tradition and especially to friars, he argued that curates too, not just bishops or the professed (the reigning view of Thomas Aquinas) participated in perfection by acting as instruments to purify and illumine their parishioners; more, that they enjoyed an apostle-like status with an authority conferred immediately by Christ.Footnote ²⁶

If the parish represented the world in micro (and for many also in macro), the fifteenth-century church as a whole still accounted itself the world in macro. The Latin church encompassed every single European except those Jews or Muslims whose communities survived in Iberian, German, Slavic, or Italian lands. Heretics and dissenters were subject too by virtue of their baptism, even the quasi-coerced baptism of conversos, relentlessly scrutinized in this era by Spain's newly institutionalized form of inquisition. Everyone belonged to religion—and yet no less to the world. Thus parish leadership and seating mirrored the social makeup of a neighborhood or village, even as a Corpus Christi procession, predominantly a fifteenth-century phenomenon in its public flourishing, embodied social rank while offering communal entertainment and personal religion. Disentangling the religious from the material, church from society, though it remained the cry of every fifteenth-century reformer, proved nearly impossible.Footnote ²⁷ More, lines blurred in some distinctively fifteenth-century ways. Carthusians, austere and revered, flourished as never before but in houses built now just outside cities and with patronage from the highest circles, thus Sheen outside London, the site of a royal palace. They copied manuscripts, also in the vernacular, probably translating The Imitation of Christ into English in Thomas's lifetime, with other Carthusian houses also gathering and translating devotional tractates, also some beyond orthodoxy such as the work for which Porete was burned to death at Paris in 1310. More locally and commonly, on the visual plane, artistic and devotional fashion in parish churches and private chapels across fifteenth-century Europe multiplied altarpieces in the thousands, their sacred figures painted or sculpted in contemporary finery, their patrons memorialized for devotion but also as portrait selves.Footnote ²⁸ On the dynastic and nationalist front the brutal conflict we call the Hundred Years' War had Joan of Arc put to death not as an enemy combatant but as a relapsed heretic, just as English royal propaganda promulgated the war effort through church rites and the cult of St. George. Broadly, kings, princes, and cities expanded control over ecclesiastical assets and personnel. To call this “laicization” or even “secularization,” as literature coming out of the nineteenth century often did, obscures the point that, while these lay powers certainly served their own social ends, they also sought to ensure that regional churches met regional religious needs, a responsibility that princes and cities took on as a right and a duty, even in the face of clerical obstreperousness.

So how did individuals sort their way through a world where the sacred and the profane so completely overlapped? Did they know at appointed times to turn firmly from Carnival to Lent? Most of us can recall the witty and ribald portrait of the human condition penned by Chaucer and other late medieval authors, but we must include as well his glowing portrait of the parish priest and his ready knowledge of liturgy. To grasp these seeming contrarieties, consider the two most widely circulated fifteenth-century church authors, Thomas of Kempen and John Gerson. The first of Thomas's pamphlets making up the Imitation presented a call to religion, or in its real title, “Admonitions helpful to a spiritual life.” Its opening chapter described the residents of Dutch towns in his day, both clergy and laity, as preoccupied with acquiring material goods, exalting in social position, gratifying desires pleasing to the flesh, seeking a long life rather than a good one, paying attention only to the present life, and loving only what quickly passed.Footnote ²⁹ Gerson by contrast described certain laypeople he knew as so intent on realizing forms of religious intensity which only the professed, in his view, could truly dedicate themselves to that they generated only inner anxiety or self-righteousness or despondency.Footnote ³⁰ Each author saw in his contemporaries differing dimensions of the sacred-profane mix, or sought to lift out one dimension he meant to address, the one speaking to clerics and laypeople fixated on life in this world who made only necessary nods to duty and the divine, the other writing for people, especially laypeople, so intent on the experiential divine that they became dangers to their own inner well-being. These tendencies did not divide along lay/clerical, rich/poor, or male/female lines. Chaucer, a layman, wrote worldly-wise tales but also a lengthy sermon on penance and a religiously anxious retraction. We should not read fifteenth-century people panoramically, either through a worldly and cynical poet like Villon (who could also write knowingly about religious life) or an exceedingly scrupulous friar like Martin Luther (who could also write pointedly about the world).

Some practices and expectations were, in principle, common to all. In Latin Christendom it was the rule after 1215 (a “divine command” as lawyers and theologians interpreted it) that everyone should make confession once a year to his or her “own priest,” ordinarily on Shrove Tuesday to prepare themselves throughout Lent for communion at Easter. Historians have seen in this mandate the point of departure for a high medieval pastoral initiative, or a rude insertion of clerical scrutiny into lay lives, or both.Footnote ³¹ In actual practice, options varied enormously. Privacy, first of all, was hardly possible in an ordinary parish. Parishioners lined up openly to kneel before a priest in a corner of the church, there to whisper or mumble responses to queries about mortal sins or common vices. It was an annual checking-in, on both sides, the priest exercising his oversight, parishioners cleansing a year's faults before daring to partake of the Lord's Body. Whether these encounters were entered into willingly or grudgingly, honestly or pro forma, quickly or in depth, or even at all, we hardly know. Margery of Kempe would suffer a crisis after childbirth owing in part, she tells us, to a serious sin she had never confessed. The Devil told her, she explained afterward, that a penance of her own undertaking would suffice with a merciful God—and she could thereby avoid exposing this sin in confession.Footnote ³² Most parishioners probably wanted nonetheless the church's cleansing before approaching the altar. But they were not without means, quite apart from silence or passive resistance. When someone in a German city was denied access to communion after a dispute over tithes, for instance, his city council protested against the priest.Footnote ³³ In addition, friars offered local competition in towns by interpreting the meaning of Omnis utriusque's “own priest” so as to include themselves (with episcopal approval). For townspeople this meant increased choice, while also provoking endless battles with curates. At stake for the clergy were authority and money, since parishioners, beyond submitting (subici) to confession, were expected to gift a coin as a complement to the gift of spiritual cleansing.

In reality, we hear about individual confessional practice mostly—this too little noted—from a minority of the spiritually intense: the scrupulous, the converts, the writers of pastoral manuals. And precisely they made, or sought to make, private arrangements, judging their local curate inadequate. Margery sought out an array of confessors, Catherine of Siena securing a Dominican, Bridget of Sweden forming her own order with priest assistants, Friar Martin Luther gaining counsel from a fellow Augustinian. Priests among the Brothers of the Common Life offered spiritual services for free to women and schoolboys in Dutch towns. In Zwolle in the 1410s the parish rector denounced them for this, the dispute eventually settled in a negotiated compromise. In an early house of Sisters at Rhenen, interestingly, the women confessed to their “Mother” before going out to the local curate (to his and the inquisitor's distress), and in a later house of Sisters of the Common Life its elected Mother kept an eye on confessional relations and intervened if a father-confessor seemed too hard on her women. Brothers—whether priests, clerics, or laymen—also offered spiritual guidance apart from priestly confession, a practice the Dominican inquisitor impugned as usurping the sacrament but which they defended as voluntary and private.Footnote ³⁴ Lollards for their part questioned the need for priestly confession, insisting on the adequacy of personal human contrition before God (“Therfore very contricioun is the essencial parte of penance, and confecioun of mouthe is the accidental parte”),Footnote ³⁵ a theological position mooted since the twelfth century and in principle conceded, but understood to require a depth of contrition beyond most people's reach, whence the papal precept ordering annual confession could be construed actually as compassionate, offering a formal cleansing through the operation of the priestly keys. Taborites, the most radical and communal of the Hussite branches, also repudiated prescribed confession to a priest but called instead for public confession of mortal sins before the entire community. The ars moriendi, also of fifteenth-century origins, generated amid the omnipresence of death, aimed to induce in individuals a state of perpetual self-examination and self-confession, checking one's faith, one's doubt, one's pride, one's avarice, one's patience, all under the immediate prospect of death and judgment. In sum, even this most basic and common of the church's prescribed practices proliferated into a range of options animated by a spectrum of personal attitudes. To speak of traditional religion or normative centering seems to miss where fifteenth-century religious energy and creativity lay: in the options opened to people, the choices individuals pursued, the acts they performed intently or indeed indifferently.

A religious sociology for the fifteenth century is not possible, and not the purpose of this essay. We cannot say what percentage may have fit Thomas's description of the essentially worldly or Gerson's of the intently religious, or indeed whether those characterizations only captured one dimension of some people at given moments in their lives. What historians can say is this: Religion saturated the forms of life. More, beyond duties and expectations people were also cracking open niches across a wide and diverse spectrum, finding ways to appropriate religion for themselves. This requires historical explanation, even definition. In medieval categories religion meant strictly the estate of the professed, then the estate of the clergy, next the “good” (that is, practicing, engaged) laity, and lastly all the baptized. To appropriate religion meant that people in the third category took on practices and aspirations generally considered the domain of the first or second. Acts largely accounted clerical, or aspirations associated with the religious, increasingly were undertaken by interested laypeople. Thus books of hours, in reality a miniature divine office, now circulated widely and in the vernacular, some two thousand copies still extant of Grote's Dutch version (of which there is as yet no proper study). These books, with their illuminations, facilitated personal prayer while also serving as primers for reading (their English name), as family records, and as items of luxury display (since their cost could be immense and even ordinary ones relatively dear).Footnote ³⁶ Women were the main owners. Wealthy households also now set up chantries, hiring clerics to say prayers, sometimes providing or underwriting a chapel, and in any case appropriating privately the intercession of clerics. More dramatically and personally, confraternities and guilds enabled people to pursue religious acts according to own choosing, one of the most marked features of the long fifteenth century: to make their own a saint, a liturgy, a devotion, even a dedicated religious space of their own choosing and made their own. As for relics, long before the papacy officially extended saintly benefits into purgatory in the 1480s, rulers were ardently amassing personal troves, led by the emperor Charles IV in Prague (d. 1378). Spiritual intercession, the marker of the clergy and religious in the Middle Ages, had in short become a public commodity, like mass stipends (another product of this era). Ever more people, also or especially laypeople, wanted, so to speak, to buy in, to participate, to have their share. Indulgences—the forgiveness of assigned penitential satisfactions in return for visiting altars or shrines, engaging in acts of charity, saying prayers, or gifting coins—served as the wholesaling, if that is not too crude a metaphor, of the treasured benefits of religion.Footnote ³⁷ While all these forms of appropriating religion had earlier histories, quite especially for the highest social classes, their multiplication across the horizon, their diversity, their implicit offering of choice—that is a vital part of the fifteenth-century story. We may also see it in one of the most dramatic features of fifteenth-century social relations. Peasants, often reviled but also accounted Christ-like for their humble labor, revolted occasionally and regionally between 1381 and 1525, claiming rights in part on the basis of religion, their dignity and liberty as the baptized and redeemed. In each case, ironically given that era's thorough sacred/social mix, princes and prelates, including Luther, condemned them for misappropriating religion for social ends.Footnote ³⁸

Religion, in short, was no longer the preserve of the professed religious. And yet, even Wyclif thought still in terms of this inherited religious paradigm, speaking of “good Christians” as living under Abbot Christ, fulfilling the counsels of religion as best they could, thereby rendering them no longer lay or worldly (secularis). John Gerson, emblem of orthodoxy, took exactly the same stance over against extreme Dominican claims, arguing that there was only one religio, that which Christ had instituted and exemplified, to be lived by all, curates and laypeople, too, as their circumstances permitted. The most direct theoretical assault on the inherited and exclusive claims of religion came from the Devotio Moderna, in an important apologetic work from the late 1390s cited across the fifteenth century and also by Gabriel Biel in the 1470s. It extended the notion and benefits of religion to those living outside vows and the legal status of religion to any who lived lives more holy, strict, and ardent than the great mass of the ordinary baptized.Footnote ³⁹ A generation later, about 1431/32 the influential Dominican Johan Nyder wrote an entire work on “the religions of the laity” (De secularium religionibus), attempting to sort out in his own mind, and for purposes of pastoral and legal counseling, the status of beguines, hermits, recluses, the Devout, secular canonesses, and a whole range of figures who were appropriating not just elements of clerical/professed religion but something approaching the very status itself.Footnote ⁴⁰ Even this Dominican offered cautious acceptance.

We might think of it as a paradoxical crossover. Already in the fifteenth century churchmen were charged for their part with appropriating more and more of the world, a charge long since become a textbook cliché—and true enough, whether or not their social and political ambitions outran those of earlier churchmen. The medieval church represented big business and high society, and had for a long time. Historians have grown wary of simplistic correlations between social and cultural change, even as church historians have learned to be equally wary of church life treated apart from its social embedding. Any approach to the European fifteenth century must acknowledge certain distinctive social realities, and quite especially the persistent threat of death by plague, with all its accompanying economic and mental dislocations. Warfare was endemic and destructive (especially in France and Italy), regional political rebellions more frequent (the Ciompi labor revolt in Florence dated 1378), and the imprint of towns upon countryside and culture now magnifying. More, across fifteenth-century society, and not just on the religious side, we find a widespread yearning to restore an imagined order, whether because things seemed then more seriously out of sync, or because this aspiration animated cultural and political life as never before, or both. What we call “reform” the fifteenth century labeled “reformatio,” whether it be a “reformation” of religion or society or law, with Luther and his colleagues simply invoking the common fifteenth-century term. Later historians made it the exclusive rubric for Protestants and their age. At issue is whether we can discern religious forces or themes particular to this era, energies cutting across locales and groups, orthodoxy and heresy, devotion and worldliness.

This was a society in which laws and lawsuits were everywhere, part of daily experience.Footnote ⁴¹ The imagined “reformations” in the fifteenth century often turned on improving, enforcing, or restoring law, perceiving law as proffering remedies to the religious and moral and social dilemmas of their day. On the conceptual plane, or in the mental imaginary if you prefer, good law rested ultimately on divine order, and so people could turn to it with a certain redemptive hopefulness as finally authoritative. Thus to adjudicate rival papal claims after the outbreak of schism, then to ground their right to force papal resignations or call a general council, princes and clerical reformers combed through church law with extraordinary persistence. Proposals for conciliar authority sprang in part from inherited legal traditions, as Tierney argued sixty years ago. But they also represented creative new political thought, an outpouring of argument on representation, participation, and governance. Councils went on in practice to propose law after law for curbing excesses and reforming the papal curia.Footnote ⁴² This inclination to turn to law, to expect it to resolve insurmountable social problems, arose everywhere. In towns aldermen imposed sumptuary laws to restrain resentment and violence in the face-to-face cramped encounters of urban streets but equally to instill moral decorum in the face of a new luxury fostered by repeated rounds of plague.Footnote ⁴³

In religious orders zealous minorities called “Observants” insisted that monks, friars, and nuns be forced to keep very precisely the rules they had vowed, and as well to pledge themselves to new disciplinary statutes and spiritual exercises all meant to discipline the personal rooms and fine clothes and refined indulgences to which these religious had grown accustomed.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Devotio Moderna circles, where Brothers and Sisters deliberately did not profess a rule, they nonetheless imposed customs and exercises on themselves to align their persons with the divine will. At one level this yearning for law mirrored in reverse a world animated by multiple religious impulses, and indeed wholly presumed that world without abandoning the vision or hope of a law possessing the power to set things right, divinely right. Lollards, to remake a corrupt church kingdom-wide, even to disendow it, presented a bill to parliament for action, only to be countered later by severe laws passed against them. In their writings Wyclif and Hus repeatedly invoked the lex dei or lex Christi to hammer away, and by it meant essentially Scripture, now brandished as “law.” Historians have sometimes gotten the sense of this turn to Scripture wrong, anticipating Protestants. Here it was to serve, among other things, as an authoritative legal instrument, if properly and literally understood, wielded to force a reshaping of church and society.Footnote ⁴⁵ Wyclif and Hus did so as university-licensed masters of this Book, publicly acknowledged experts so to speak—that, by the way, being Gerson's only real claim to authority as well. Standing back, then, notions of “law” were hardly the same, not even among Observant religious whose rules obviously differed one from another. The yearning, however, was common, and efforts to invoke and enforce law, whether desperate or hopeful, always met resistance, for this ordering law intentionally challenged practices both customary and privileged (also in medieval terms “law”), with Wyclif's Scriptural law, for instance, challenging the curia's papal law as well as a civil law of dominion.

Imposing a single purifying law exceeded the means of fifteenth-century reformers. It also exceeded majority wishes. Most convents, for instance, satisfied with their way of life, comfortable with separate rooms and private burses, clung to what they had in the face of plague losses and economic upheaval, justifying their position as good old tradition.Footnote ⁴⁶ In response, Observants set up their own networks, usually regional, a determined grouping of the like-minded within or alongside or eventually outside an inherited order. The Modern-Day Devout, too, organized their religious households as private societies and in civic law, then networked houses together in associations they called colloquies. This is what Catherine of Siena did with her familia (until Dominican Observants in effect co-opted her), and what Lollard and Hussite groups attempted in their surviving communities, as did Waldensians high up in the Alps. Creating independent networks and associations exploited a niche. But in fact, voluntary associations of all sorts—in paradoxical tension with dreams of redemptive laws—made manifest an impulse that cut across all of fifteenth-century religious life. It generated, for instance, thousands of confraternities and guilds across Europe, groups organizing voluntarily to cultivate a particular devotion, maintain a side altar, organize a trade guild's religious rites, set up a burial society, gather a sodality of elite humanists seeking refinement and divinity—and so on through a long list.Footnote ⁴⁷ Many such groups kept membership lists, set conditions for entry, wrote up statutes, and established required ritual observances. Some were independent, some connected to a chapel, and some located within a parish or collegiate or cathedral church. A good-sized town church could boast a dozen such, a country church one or two, a city far more (ninety-nine in Hamburg). These associations generally mirrored social rank, though a group like the Brothers of the Common Life deliberately brought together priests, clerics, and laypeople in a single communal household. Indeed, this associational impulse, we might argue, seized the whole church thrown into crisis in early 1415 when popes fled or resisted the council. The Council of Constance formed an association under the leadership of Master John Gerson, Haec sancta, proclaiming it doctrine that this assembly represented the society of the church, its powers received directly from Christ.

In social and legal practice, the securing of a privilege crucially enabled these associations. A privilege was a document confirming their right to pursue specified practices. In theory this was nothing new: bishops had long authorized hermits or recluses, for instance. But now confraternities and pious associations routinely sought warrant in writing for their group and its practices or devotions, secured by gift, negotiation, persuasion, or even lawsuit, all this big business in episcopal courts. Friar Martin Luther's first and only trip to Rome turned on disputes concerning stricter statutes within his Observant Augustinian Friars. When Margery of Kempe set out on her unusual, self-designed way of life (to the dismay of many around her), she too, a bourgeois woman, knew to seek “letters,” authorizing documents from bishops specifying, it seems (the documents now gone), her right to seek her own confessor, to commune frequently, and perhaps to wear her white garb. She knew to do this because securing written privileges was simply a way of life in the fifteenth-century church, often for what might appear to us ironic or even contradictory purposes. Thus, sons of priests had to secure a privilege of dispensation if they wished to follow their fathers into the priesthood, in this case mostly from the papal curia, and they did so in the tens of thousands in the fifteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁸ It could also prove contradictory. Or, more historically approached, in practice a complex and encompassing church could thereby allow multiple societies and options to function, and even to flourish. The same papacy that banned beguines about 1317, for instance, then issued licenses for individual houses of “good beguines” (for instance, in Brussels) beginning already in 1319, even drawing up a standard formula for it; bishops too locally and repeatedly protected “their” beguines from the papal law with an authorizing privilege. This was a world that trafficked in niches and loopholes, people and associations pursuing their religious ends, bargaining to gain privileges for their group or devotion. In the case of the Devotio Moderna it required fifteen years, after drawing up sophisticated legal defenses and blocking an inquisitor in court, before the local bishop (Utrecht) agreed to warrant their societies and practices.Footnote ⁴⁹ Of course not every association and religious practice could secure approval or maneuver around social or legal constraints. Of interest, then, reversing some recent historical logic, would be to examine more closely what could not be negotiated, which groups could not find a niche, which people had no access to privileges, and why (as touching some perceived core principle, or social class or literacy or leadership, or simply as a matter of local circumstance). Lollards got caught for challenging eucharistic teaching and calling for disendowment. Some beguines eventually fell prey when bishops ceased to protect them. But lines ran crooked. Even Hussites eventually negotiated successfully for their practice of lay access to the chalice.

All these networks and associations, also the determined invoking of law, presupposed active forms of communication, the means for people to broadcast religious purposes, ideals, and practices. Two forms deserve note here. This era witnessed a startling expansion in preaching.Footnote ⁵⁰ Friars had first launched widespread preaching in thirteenth-century towns, and Observant friars would emerge as star performers in the fifteenth, the preaching tours of San Bernardino and John of Capistrano legendary in Italy, so too John Brugman in the Low Countries, along with other regional figures. Preaching, moreover, now assumed new roles. Savonarola, an observant Dominican, launched a moral crusade, complete with a bonfire of vanities, and fomented a political revolution in Florence before he, after four years, was condemned to burn as a heretic—a striking reversal. Most reformers launched their enterprises as preachers, Geert Grote as a deacon touring Dutch towns, John Hus holding forth in the Bethlehem Chapel at Prague, Catherine of Siena addressing followers in person and by letter, Birgit communicating revelations to popes and the rest of society. The Modern-Day Devout delivered “collations” to laypeople and schoolboys, not sermons but vernacular addresses ranging from Bible readings to spiritual exhortations, this contested but ultimately conceded. But preaching also became good moral and social form. City governments in Italy and the Rhineland appointed and paid Lenten preachers as a public service, even competing for the most famous. Sermons in writing could teach as well, especially an inside crowd, this going back to Eckhardt and Tauler. Lollards rapidly produced a cycle of vernacular sermons to instruct people in faith and mores and to critique a church they saw as corrupted especially by friars and property. All the same churchmen still controlled access to the pulpit in principle. Grote for instance was suspended after he blasted local curates in synod for their female hearthmates and called on his fellow Devout to withdraw from sinning priests. In 1476 the visionary of Niklashausen, Hans Bohm, preached the overturning of ecclesiastical privilege—he too promptly crushed, by princes as much as churchmen, such fiery preaching, as with Savonarola and to a degree the Lollards, considered a threat as much to political as to ecclesiastical order. Still, there was in this fifteenth-century world, as with networked associations, remarkable local room for maneuver and working agreements (cities taking over the appointment of preachers, the Devout delivering public collations, Lollard sermons and Bibles widely circulated). We do well to remember too that audience reactions were widely mixed. Preaching was a public performance, a social entertainment, and it could elicit amused smiles or cynical mockery as well as rapt audiences. In Zwolle about 1383 a patrician told Geert Grote to cut it out and let people go down to hell in peace.

Alongside this culture of preaching and sometimes overlapping with it, religious writings in the vernacular spread as never before, accounting for, scholars now estimate, 70–80 percent of extant manuscripts with prose texts in English, Dutch, and German (the French, Italian, and Spanish materials not assessed to my knowledge).Footnote ⁵¹ Of late it has become fashionable to view this as a subversive move, presenting a religious alternative to clerical thinking in Latin.Footnote ⁵² The reality was far more complex. In the fifteenth century, materials moved continuously between Latin and the vernaculars and back again, as did suspect materials. Translations multiplied, of twelfth-century authors like Bernard or of Franciscans like Bonaventure, but also of Eckhart and Porete despite the bans, most of their manuscripts in fact dating to the fifteenth century. Only in England was there an attempted ban on Lollard vernacular texts, and it essentially did not work. Lollard sermons and Bibles are still extant in dozens of copies, with some Bibles marked for church pericopes, thus as aids to liturgical reading.Footnote ⁵³ In the Low Countries in the 1390s, the Modern-Day Devout warded off the inquisitor with a tractate in Dutch and Latin defending moral, devotional, and liturgical texts in the vernacular. The reasons given were multiple, some historical (the Bible was written in the vernacular of its day), some authoritative (fathers and popes had commended it), some practical (people absorb what they read better than what they hear every fourteen days, his notion of average sermon attendance). This author conceded defensively that heretical or obscure materials (for which he cited Eckhart) should not circulate freely among the simple or uninitiatedFootnote ⁵⁴—though they in fact did. Much of this vernacular religious writing was meant, it seems, for private religious women like Sisters of the Common Life or recluses, as well as for lay brothers attached to religious houses—that is, for the religiously intense, those Gerson now wrote for extensively in French and also worried about. How many ordinary laypeople owned such books is not clear. They were more likely to possess, if they could read and afford one, a book of hours or a guide to confession, such as Bishop Antonino in mid-century Florence prepared in Italian, this too for women. After the 1460s printing, as the Rouses argued,Footnote ⁵⁵ simply extended this self-same energy by way of mechanical and more efficient means, contrary to the revolutionary claims often made for printing as such. Most incunabula contained religious texts, and many early presses were closely attached to religious houses, some again to Brothers of the Common Life. Printers needed audiences to buy their books and found them where they could, certainly in aristocratic and bourgeois lay households but also overwhelmingly among people seeking greater access to these religious texts.

Historians have sometimes called the fifteenth century an “age of devotion,” a sweeping gesture toward all these multiplying practices and forms of participation, especially for women.Footnote ⁵⁶ Devotion, most agree, turned especially on the passion, the sacrifice itself in its startling realism, with the “Man of Sorrows” and the “Veronica” along with the “pieta” now emerging as objects of devotion along with the crucifixion itself.Footnote ⁵⁷ The twelfth- and thirteenth-century church had articulated a new interest in the humanity of Christ and had also made the Eucharist the paradigmatic sacrament, defining the power of priesthood and the ordinary means of grace. But the fifteenth century, I would argue, moved the passion itself to the center, a new approach that consciously or unconsciously extended the reach of grace, now often visualized as a very bloody grace. People who took communion only rarely or fearfully (the norm was once a year) could nonetheless meditate on an image of the crucified, shape their affections according to a passion tractate, make pilgrimage to a shrine of the holy blood, enter prayerfully into the wounds of Christ, reprove themselves with the instruments of the passion (another feature of this age), pray the rosary—and this any time they chose or needed to, infrequently or obsessively, in fear or in hope, enabled by these means personally to enter the bloody heart, so to speak, of the religion. Even that blood acquired now its own independent cults and shrines.Footnote ⁵⁸ The effect of all this was, as I see it, to de-center the church's central spiritual treasure, to open it up to participation in innumerable ways, some extravagantly vivid, some creatively personal, some non-ecclesiastical. To treat them as ultimately one (because oriented toward the passion) misses the energy of differentiated and creative self-appropriation. In the circles of the Devotio Moderna, for instance, thinking through the passion scene by scene in daily mental meditation was conceived of as reforming the memory (reformatio memoriae), the conscious and unconscious repository of the self, one of three human faculties (memory, intellect, and will) to be moved in ascent toward an ultimate “purifying of the heart.”Footnote ⁵⁹ A Devout Sister at the house in Emmerich “exercised [herself] so inwardly and devoutly in the life and suffering of Our Lord that she poured out tears”—but this not at mass or before an image but silently and while at work hours a day on textiles (the means for supporting themselves); more, when she pressed the cloth to her, she “thought she pressed God himself against her breasts”Footnote ⁶⁰—this recorded by one of the Sisters and in Dutch. This appropriating could take other forms. Luther's consoling word, I would suggest, was that friar's way, for him finally the only theologically and spiritually satisfying way amid this host of fifteenth-century options (of which he was keenly aware and experienced in several).

Theology meanwhile languished, an old commonplace has it, its arid scholastic speculation increasingly distanced from an ever more affective devotion.Footnote ⁶¹ First, we must be historically accurate. Universities with theological faculties increased nearly ten-fold during the fifteenth century, even as religious communities with literate women and men multiplied more times still, each producing respectively more school theology and more devotional manuals, writings to varying degrees ever more specialized and more in-house. That said and taken seriously, among theologians the real movement was in the reverse, toward theological engagement with issues of practice. Oberman established long ago, and Hamm and his students have emphasized even more, that later medieval theologians, along with speculative interests that could appear far removed from devotion, argued endlessly and subtly over such topics as merit, divine acceptance, grace, contrition, free will, and much else crucial to a theological understanding of practice's inner workings. More, they placed the will, both divine and human, at the center of their systems, crucial to the larger conceptualizing of a world of making and appropriating, resolving and organizing. Still more important, these theologians undertook such discussions now in dedicated tractates, not just in academic disputes and commentaries. Gerson again proved the exemplar, his numerous theological tractates addressing a multitude of disputed practices from mystical experience (critiquing Ruusbroec's union without means) to Joan of Arc's visions and male dress (of which he approved).Footnote ⁶² Amid public schism and conciliar debate, tractates abounded as well on every conceivable dimension of ecclesiology, but also across the century on the Devout way of life, new uses of the rosary, and nearly every other conceivable topic of religious practice. Bynum's study of the holy blood cults at Wilsnack drew upon such tractates for and against to illumine a sophisticated debate that turned on, at the risk of oversimplifying, whether this cult blood could in fact be that of the crucified Christ, an issue thus of Christology, or the sacramental blood of the glorified Christ and thus possess the passion's saving power, with many theologians doubting both.Footnote ⁶³ Consider another example, known but little studied, its materials in part still unedited. In the 1420s–1430s the cult of the Holy Name spread through Italy, championed by the Franciscan Observant Bernardino of Siena, critiqued by others including the humanist Ambrogio Traversari. Bernardino employed a votive tablet emblazoned simply with the letters of the Name (IHS), this visible in images of the saint, though almost none of the original tablets have survived. In this passion-centric age, such iconic simplicity suggested to some nothing less than a scandalous erasure of the bloody cross and crucified Christ—while others, as with the Holy Blood, doubted the veracity or powers invested in these cult objects. Treatises appeared, and in 1427 fifty-two Dominican friars and ten Augustinians gathered at the papal court, where Bernardino the famed Franciscan preacher was charged with heresy. The indictment was eventually lifted, and Bernardino went on ardently preaching the Holy Name, though controversy festered for another twenty years. Both cults offered new and quite different visual access to Jesus, the first by way of drops of his shed blood, the second through the letters of his name, whereupon theologians publicly worried and debated the doctrinal implications of either. In both cases popular following outran and eventually overran the skepticism of churchmen and theologians.

Another defining trait of the fifteenth-century religious world, if at first glance quite different in tone, was its insistent moral didacticism, now sometimes called “exemplarism” by English literary scholars.Footnote ⁶⁴ Authors and preachers, in Latin and especially in the vernacular, manifested a nearly insatiable appetite for holy lives, expositions of the virtues and vices, and indeed moral exhortation of every kind. The ten commandments (a personal form of restorative law) gained new prominence in the fifteenth century alongside the virtues and vices (ultimately monastic in origin) as a platform for preaching and self-examination—engraved now on wooden tablets for parish churches, a fifteenth-century, not a Reformation, innovation. “Mirrors” (specula), exhortatory and exemplary guides, multiplied in every vernacular language, turning not just on devotions or virtues but on social types, that is, what was expected of the prince, the merchant, the recluse, and so on, offering, as the survey of these tractates in Dutch puts it, ideal images and the stuff for self-reflection.Footnote ⁶⁵ The entire spiritual program of the Modern-Day Devout turned on what they called “progress in the virtues,” it being the touchstone, what they exhorted people to in their talks, schoolboys first of all, and also what they examined in themselves each night before going to bed. All the ubiquitous passion meditations too aimed finally to form divine affections, curb human passions, and remake selves in the image of a suffering Lord. Christine de Pizan (1364–ca. 1430) sustained a successful writing career in Paris, producing work after work of moral and didactic instruction in a literarily ambitious style. This was a society, in short, obsessed with talking about right living. Its range extended from almost morbid self-examination to strident critiques of political leaders and the mores of churchmen, much of it platitudinous (that in some sense the point). But all this, we must note, informed the humanist program too, to cultivate in elegant Latin a persuasive rhetoric and moral philosophy to replace all that “useless speculation,” to offer new and stylish means to instruct princes, citizens, or believers. We might also venture to see it in the new fifteenth-century cults of Joseph (now envisioned as the sturdy carpenter and helpful husband), Anne (as the wise and trusted mother of the Mother of God: to whom Luther made his vow amid a lightning storm in 1505), and the Holy Family (depicted as exuding a kind of burgher virtue and mutual contentment). These figures embodied the saintly or cultic expression of this humanizing moral didacticism. Erasmus grew up a schoolboy under the care of the Modern-Day Devout and later disparaged all this as grindingly obsessive. Yet one of his earliest literary works was on “contempt for the world,” and his mature literary work, in a playful and classicizing language, centered on moral adages and ethical critiques, on turning proverbial sayings into elegant and learned moral essays.

We should recognize finally in fifteenth-century life a strong and distinctive meditative tone. An activist streak had propelled medieval Christendom in the years between 1200 and 1350: mendicants out preaching and teaching and confessing, laypeople and religious women setting up hospices and charities, mystics storming the citadel of the innermost divine, Porete articulating an utter annihilation of the loving soul in the divine abyss, Eckhart a Christ born ultimately in the mystic's heart. These energies, and the religious literatures they produced, would continue to be read in the fifteenth century, even if mendicants were now resented more than ever for their intrusiveness and the mystical literature was read more cautiously. The 1370s–1520s set a different spiritual tone, partly in reaction, one which Hamm has set out as a Frömmigkeitstheologie. Fifteenth-century authors and practitioners aimed most especially now at a deepened interiority, not a ruthless “emptying of the self” or an undifferentiated union beyond desire. Hence their widespread turn back to twelfth-century authors like William of St. Thierry and Bernard, with an overlay of Franciscan teaching, especially that of Bonaventure. But fifteenth-century readers were increasingly not cloistered or professed, and working in the vernacular. The tone shifted. Not necessarily under vow, cultivating religious lives on a more personal basis inside or outside the cloister, wary of mystic “excesses” condemned earlier, these private and self-made religious sought quite intently what they called spiritual solace, consolatio in Latin, comfort in middle English, Trost/troost in German or Dutch. To stay with an earlier example, Margery Kempe opened her Book describing it as “comfortabyl for sinful wrecchys, wherein thei may have gret solas and comfort” and come to understand the “hy and unspecabyl mercy” of Christ.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the fifteenth century a literature of consolatio in all its manifestations and dimensions flourished as never before, right alongside all the literature on the passion and that of moral didacticism. That comparison has not yet been fully recognized and expounded.

People sought some palpable inner experience of a divine presence to comfort or reassure. To achieve it they might appropriate some aspect of the passion or submit their inner and outer selves to moral instruction. While for Margery of Kempe this issued often in bursts of loud crying, most annoying to those around her, in general its expression was quiet, something they could know or feel or see within. It might come as a vision of the Christ-child at communion, a flow of tears on seeing an image of the passion, or a rush of relief at guilt submerged in Christ's bloody wounds. Sometimes, as Gerson worried, this could also issue, ironically, in an even more desperate search for solace, some palpable or visible manifestation of the divine. Yet nearly always its end was an experience of comfort, of mercy. This people might seek in multiple ways already noted, ordinary and extraordinary, pilgrimage to see the holy blood or simply to fix their eyes on an elevated host. From it they sought an immediacy of inner peace. These words, “interiority” and “peace,” we find everywhere in this religious literature, noticeably different from the mystical language of the foregoing age. Like all the morally didactic literature, it can also appear flat and platitudinous to a modern reader, especially in its quantity and repetitions—but that should not obviate its historical distinctiveness and even originality. We find this strong meditational pull toward the interior also among some of the humanists, thus in the flourishing of what Marsilio Ficino would call a Platonic Theology centered on, to quote his subtitle, the “immortality of the soul.”

Once again we see it in the Devotio Moderna. In the second of Thomas's pamphlets, properly titled “on drawing people to things inward” (ad interna trahentes), a person of interiority (internus homo) is to put the care of himself above all other cares, nor can he be a person of interiority and devotion (internus et devotus) unless he falls silent about all other things and has regard specially for himself. Convert yourself with your whole heart, Thomas enjoins at the outset, and you will find peace (requiem). Give yourself to things within, and you will see the kingdom of God come in you, the “interior person” knowing “frequent visitations.” If Jesus speaks only one word within, you feel great solace (magna consolatio sentitur). Indeed a lover of Jesus, a truly interior person, can (here a telltale transformation of that earlier mystical way) elevate himself above himself in spirit and know a fruition of quietude (fruitiue quiescere)—not a loss of self in rapturous union or in the divine abyss but a quietening within, it the satisfying “fruit,” an allusion in Latin to the Dutch word Ruusbroec used for “enjoying” the divine. Such a person will then perceive things in wisdom “as they are” and, very importantly, be able to bring others to peaceFootnote ⁶⁷—the experience directed back outward. Thomas's work circulated more widely in the fifteenth century than any other. Its seeking after solace and quietude represents the mirrored reversal, or perhaps the imagined ultimate and inner end, of a world busy with religious questing, with multiple options.

This essay has turned frequently to materials from the Low Countries and the movement known as the Devotio Moderna, in part because it represents the body of source material this author knows best and has just completed work on. A scholar beginning from Prague or Siena or Nuremberg or Spain or England, in keeping with the regionalism dominant in this age, might well adjust emphases, change some tones, add features not noted here. Textbooks nonetheless still standardly cite the Devotio Moderna as the leading or most characteristic expression of the late medieval religious world. The trouble has been to get it right, not to frame it from the outside but to see it from the inside and in context, then to consider whether its characteristics or concerns may be found, with locally distinctive markers, elsewhere too. And they can. Whether one chooses to look at the larger picture, the undercurrents and trends, or to focus on a particular region and its manifestations, becomes then a matter of historical praxis and choice. No treatment of the fifteenth century, however, will do it justice historically, at least from the vantage point of religion and culture, unless it helps to explain why Thomas's four pamphlets penned about 1420 in the northern Low Countries, then assembled as The Imitation of Christ, emerged as the runaway bestseller. That is a larger task. This essay has attempted to re-create, among other things, the larger world in which it found such resonance, that world of multiple options.

Early sixteenth-century reformers grew up in the fifteenth-century church. In the later sixteenth century, Protestants and Catholics alike would build new communities sprung from their fresh initiatives and insights, often anchored at least in part on one or another of these fifteenth-century options, even while defiantly rejecting others. Erasmus (b. 1466), canon regular and humanist scholar, critic of churchmen and indulger of genteel pleasures, champion of the Greek New Testament and advocate of a moralizing philosophy of Christ, is sometimes said to have lacked the courage or decisiveness to choose, to go Catholic or Protestant during the last fifteen years of his life. We might better say that he clung to the fifteenth-century world in which he had grown up, a world of multiple and even contradictory options, of religion and humanism, a moralizing philosophy of Christ and witty humanist circles. He had little ear or time for the new Reformers' initiatives or insights. What he sensed in them was a stringent closing down of options, setting a God or a pope in sovereign charge over what had been a world of voluntary initiatives and personalizing religion, any individual appropriation of religion and Christ's passion now narrowed determinedly to that one way accounted true inside their community. In the course of the sixteenth century the medieval church came to an end, more lingeringly than historians used to allow for, a frustration at times to Protestant and post-Tridentine reformers still cleaning up fifteenth-century practices and devotions in the later sixteenth and even early seventeenth centuries. In its place, fenced-in communities assumed their places, Anabaptist groups, Evangelical Lutheran parishes, Reformed churches, an Anglican church, a Roman Catholic church, each now a smaller world, allowing people fewer options, or in confessionalized regimes later on no options at all, at least in principle, this all undertaken in a fervent effort to deepen teaching and tighten discipline. What these Reformers found no longer sustainable or indeed desirable was the fifteenth-century church's carnival of religious options, multiple, competing, contested, coexistent, negotiated, overlapping, local, personally appropriated.