lay more moderate forms of religious sentiment and behaviour. Among these one of the more important was the so-called devotio moderna, which had developed from modest beginnings in Holland in the late fourteenth century. Probably influenced initially by Rhineland devotional cults and by some of Meister Eckhardt's (d. 1327) teachings on the sanctity of the everyday and mundane, a Carthusian novice called Gerhard Groote ( 1340-84), who was ordained a deacon in 1380, established a community of brethren at Deventer. These Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life, as they came to be known, lived a communal existence, receiving lay people into their houses, and provided an excellent example of an attempt to channel lay piety into non-heretical, practical activities. One of the most important functions of the Brethren's houses was the production of books. Their inmates were scribes, bookbinders, and illuminators who formed veritable publishing houses for the production and dissemination of religious books, of which the house at Zwolle in north Holland was among the most noted. But houses were soon established in Westphalia and Württemberg. Lay piety, practical work, and evangelism by means of the written word combined to make the brethren exponents of a devotional life which had a certain realism about it.

The days of heroic monasticism, such as that of St Bernard's early Cistercians, were over and the Brethren of the Common Life demonstrated the extent to which the laity actively sought a place within a clerically dominated Church. Although the houses of the Brethren became increasingly clerical in composition during the later fifteenth century their influence extended far beyond their walls. Among the older religious orders within the Church there were indeed attempted reforms--of the Carmelites and Cistercians in particular--but the order which gained most later medieval support and endowment from laymen were the Carthusian brothers. In England the only new monastic foundations of any significance were Charterhouses--at London ( 1370), and Mountgrace in North Yorkshire ( 1396). The Carthusian monk was essentially a

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