Devotio Moderna: Confrontations with Scholastic, University Culture

Abstract

The founding stories of the Devotio Moderna began with a book burning and explicit rejections of scholastic, university culture. Most scholars have either pitted the movement’s dimensions of pastoral care and teaching against each other as exclusive alternatives or have declined to treat the New Devout’s status as a culture of learning. However, if we are to take this mythos as essential to the movement, we must proceed from the outset that confrontations with scholastic, university culture lay at the heart of the Devotio Moderna. This thesis suggests that either above approach is inadequate and misreads the movement. Using Charles Taylor’s framework of the Social Imaginary, this thesis argues that the Devotio Moderna developed based on an Augustinian Imaginary, a sense deriving from Augustine and his medieval interlocutors. By the time of the Observant Century, this Augustinian Imaginary now stood in competition with the universitas, a competing Social Imaginary that the New Devout could not reconcile with their Augustinian Imaginary and therefore rejected. By articulating the Devotio Moderna’s daily habits of reading, writing, and prayer, this thesis argues that this conflict between the Devotio Moderna and scholastic, university culture loomed large in the movement’s imagination. By relocating the key issues in analysis of the Devotio Moderna, we see the difficulty of the historian writing within the institution that the New Devout opposed, but which ultimately supplanted the movement. This thesis is therefore significant as a repositioning of analysis of the Devotio Moderna as a movement in relation fundamentally to scholastic, university culture, and in being an articulation of the difficulty for the universitas’ distant descendant, the modern discipline of history, to understand a historical movement animated by an imaginary opposed to that which vivified, and continues to vivify, university culture.