Although Thomas à Kempis’s writings include numerous other treatises, sermons, and letters, his fame rests almost exclusively on the Imitatio Christi. Therefore, the volume, which grew out of the international conference held at the former Windesheim convent of Soeterbeeck in 2021 to mark the 550th anniversary of his death, sets a promising agenda: to examine Thomas’s works, their contexts, and their reception (1).
The articles on Thomas himself merit special attention. Van Geest portrays the canon regular as a mystagogue, maintaining “that there is a sharp caesura between a first and a second period in his authorship,” and dating the divide to 1441 (6). Regarding the Imitatio Christi, which he assigns to the first period, Van Geest emphasizes that Thomas did not conceive its four books as a “single unit,” but as separate treatises. Nevertheless, read together they point the way to union with Christ, revealing the genius of “Thomas I” as a mystagogue—against which the later “Thomas II” falls short.
The opposing view, which reads the Imitatio Christi as a single, unified work, is advanced by Caspers in this volume. Focusing on the book devoted to the Eucharist, he asks to what extent the whole can be considered ascetic or mystical—his answer is both—while noting structural parallels with Ruusbroec’s Een spieghel der eeuwigher salicheit.
Goudriaan’s analysis of Thomas’s hagiographical writing is entirely comparative; on this basis he shows that Thomas deliberately abridged the Vita Lidewigis, pruning material that might invite theological speculation, with particular attention to the famous episode of the miraculous Host.
The remaining contributions address manuscripts in St. Petersburg and aspects of (Catholic) reception: (1) the handling of Thomas’s bone relics by the archpriest of Zwolle during the “Disaster Year” of 1672; (2) Johann Michael Sailer’s Enlightenment-era German edition of the Imitatio Christi; (3) with a focus on the Netherlands, the linkage between nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions of the Imitatio Christi and public worship; and (4) from a history-of-research perspective, St Titus Brandsma’s (d. 1942) interpretation of the Modern Devotion.
In brief, the volume offers interesting insights, yet it moves beyond the customary Imitatio Christi-centered focus in Thomas studies only in part.
