Mathilde van Dijk

Baking the Bread and Roasting the Meat: Dorlandus's Saint Lawrence as a model for Carthusians

The two sermons on Saint Lawrence by the prolific Carthusian author Petrus Dorlandus survive in a manuscript from the charterhouse in Louvain, which was used for reading at table. Dorlandus’s devel...

Introduction. Faithful to the cross in a Moving World : Late Mediëval Carthusians as Devotional Reformers

This is the introduction to the thematic issue Faithful to the Cross in a Moving World: Late Medieval Carthusians as Devotional Reformers. The editors discuss how the Carthusian order expanded in the Late Middle Ages and how, in contrast to the first Carthusians, new charterhouses were created in or close to the cities. The introduction studies how this change came about, connecting it to the orders origin in the monastic reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the changing economy of piety in the Late Middle Ages, and developing ideas as to what was the best form of religious of religious life.

Working with Tradition, Aiming for Reform: Dorlandus’s Perspective on Hagiography

This article examines how the Carthusian Peter Dorlandus (1454–1507) rewrote the material about well-known saints like Joseph of Nazareth, Catherine of Alexandria, Cecilia of Rome, and Francis of Assisi so as to serve in the reformation both of individual believers and of the Church. He experimented with different genres: the traditional hagiographical genre of a vita, a hybrid text between the sermon and the vita, and the dialogue. Saint Joseph is primarily depicted as excelling in his radical intimacy with Christ and as a missionary. Dorlandus puts forward the virgin martyrs as spiritual leaders, for instance, in a dialogue between Cecilia and Francis, in which she teaches him that devotion is about the inner person. This article argues that this connects to the Carthusian faith regarding female visionaries such as Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, and Bridget of Sweden as providers of guidance in the crisis of the Church.

Disciples of the deep desert. Windesheim biographers and the imitation of the Desert Fathers

This article examines how biographers from the Chapter of Windesheim construed their brothers and sisters as the new desert fathers. In the Devotio Moderna, these first hermits, monks, and nuns were regarded as the epitomes of what true piety was about. Windesheim biographers like John Busch put their subjects forward as the new practitioners of true piety, as it had been coined by the desert fathers. But what did this mean to them? How did they interpret the desert father material? How did they use it to create new examples for religious practice?

De wil op god afstemmen

From the fourteenth century, the Dutch and the German language areas were the scenes of a revolution. There was a virtual explosion of texts in the vernacular, both original works and translations. The intended audience consisted of layfolk, inside and outside religious communities. This paper discusses a Middle Dutch copy of a most popular text on both sides of the present day border: the Decalogue by the Southern German Franciscan Marquard of Lindau. It survived from the Brandeshouse, a community of Sisters of the Common Life at Deventer. Originally, the Decalogue had been written in German. It is typical of the kind of literature that was created for lay use, along the lines that had been recommendend by Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen in his treatises Super Modo Vivendi and De teutonicalibus libris. Originally, the Decalogue was probably intended for an audience of either Clarisses or Franciscan Tertiaries. The Decalogue is relatively simple and primarily aimed at a change of behavior. The primary messages are about sin and how to recognize and avoid it. First and foremost, sin is a matter of the interior: sinful behavior is rooted in a misdirected will. The remedy is to align the soul to God and to harmonize with His will.