Acquiring Religious Perfection Outside a Vow. The Carthusian Institution of the Donati in Late Medieval Reformist Communities and the Modern Devotion

This essay shows that the late medieval Carthusian innovation of the monastic ‘donates’ (or donati) was adopted by most of the reformist religious orders and congregations in Germany and the Low Countries in the fifteenth century. Furthermore, it is argued that the earliest communities of Modern Devout, the so-called Brethren of the Common Life, constituted donates ‘in the private’, outside of the walls of cloisters. To understand this institutional choice of the early Modern Devout, it is useful to look at the literary output of Henry of Coesfeld, prior of the charterhouse of Monnikhuizen near Arnhem. The initiator of the Modern Devotion, Geert Grote, had stayed at Monnikhuizen during Henry’s priorate. It allows one to place Henry of Coesfeld’s ideas on reform as well as the success of the ‘donate’ institution within a larger context of religious perfection, moral decline within the ‘traditional’ orders, and ‘modern-day’ excesses of lay piety.