Editing Brethren of the Common Life (section)

==Education and activity==
The majority of the Brethren were laymen who did go on to not take monastic vows, but they did sign their possessions away to common use on entering the community.<ref name=post/> They devoted themselves to doing charitable work, chaplaining schools, nursing the sick, studying and teaching the Scriptures, and copying religious and inspirational works. They founded or supported a number of schools that became famous for their high standards of learning. Many famous men attended these schools, including [[Nicholas of Cusa]], [[Thomas à Kempis]], and [[Erasmus]], all of whom studied at the Brethren-associated school at Deventer.<ref name=calgary>[https://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/endmiddle/bluedot/brethren.html "The Brethren of the Common Life", ''The End of Europe's Middle Ages'', University of Calgary] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120814010458/http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/endmiddle/bluedot/brethren.html |date=August 14, 2012 }}</ref>

Books and the library were central to the communities of Brethren, whose scrupulous copies of works of piety supported their houses and put the texts in which they found spiritual sustenance in many hands. The houses of the brothers and sisters occupied themselves with literature and education, though not academic theology, and their [[priest]]s also with preaching. Lay brothers rarely then became priests, however the Brethren encouraged students to become clerics or monks.<ref name=post/> 

When Groote began, education in the [[Netherlands]] was still rare, unlike in [[Italy]] and the southern parts of the [[Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation]]; the University of Leme of the schools of [[Liège]] was only a vague memory. Apart from some of the clergy who had studied at the universities and cathedral schools in [[Paris]] or in [[Cologne]], there were few scholars in the land; even amongst the higher clergy there were many who were ignorant of the scientific study of [[Latin]], and the ordinary burgher of the Dutch cities was quite content if, when his children left school, they were able to read and write the Medieval [[Low German]] and [[Middle Dutch|Diets]].

Groote determined to change all that. The Brethren worked consistently in the [[scriptorium]]; afterwards, with the printing press, they were able to publish their spiritual writings widely. Among them are to be found the best works of 15th-century [[Flemish literature|Flemish prose]]. 

The Brethren were specially involved in youth education, running many schools and associated hostels: in the early 1500s Brethren in [[Zwolle ]] built a large a house which would hold 200 poor schoolboys.<ref name=post>{{cite book |last1=Post |first1=R.R. |title=Chapter Fourteen The Brethren of the Common Life After c. 1485, The Modern Devotion, R.R. Post |url=https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/post029mode01_01/post029mode01_01_0039.php |language=nl}}</ref>
The Brethren spared no pains to obtain good masters, if necessary from foreign countries, for their schools, which became centres of spiritual and intellectual life of the Catholic Church; amongst those whom they trained or who were associated with them were men like [[Thomas à Kempis]], [[Dierick Maertens]], [[Gabriel Biel]], the physician [[Vesalius]], [[Jan Standonck]] (1454–1504), priest and reformer, Master of the [[Collège de Montaigu]] in [[Paris]], and the Dutch [[Pope Adrian VI]].

Another famous student of the Brethren of the Common Life was [[Desiderius Erasmus]] of Rotterdam. His mystical and scholarly efforts produced many works of literature. One of his greatest contributions to the Christian faith was a critical Greek New Testament (1514) which challenged the previous New Testament text translations (specifically the Vulgate). Commonly called Erasmus, he embraced ecclesiastical structure yet challenged Luther's version of the Augustinian view on pre-destination (that due to [[total depravity]], people cannot choose God, but God is the only one who brings people into grace and salvation), the nature of the human will, and the corruption and problems in parts of the late medieval church. He rarely mentioned the Brethren or the ''devotio moderna''; his ''[[ad fontes]]'' ideology made him little interested in any theology or religion from his millenium, however there are many major points of contact between his thought and the ''devotio moderna''.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Post |first1=R.R. |title=The Modern Devotion: Confrontation with Reformation and Humanism |date=1 January 1968 |doi=10.1163/9789004477155_019}}</ref>

[[Martin Luther]] studied under the Brethren of the Common Life at Magdeburg before going on to the University of Erfurt.

Through the trade connections of the Dutch Hanseatic cities [[Deventer]] and [[Zwolle]] the ideas of the Modern devotion spread over the whole of the Hanseatic trade area. Before the fifteenth century closed, the Brethren of the Common Life had placed in all Germany and the Netherlands schools in which teaching was offered "for the love of God alone."

Gradually the course of study, at first elementary, embraced the humanities, philosophy, and theology. The religious orders were not impressed, as the Brethren were neither monks nor friars, but they were protected by Popes [[Pope Eugene IV|Eugene IV]], [[Pope Pius II|Pius II]], and [[Pope Sixtus IV|Sixtus IV]]. The Brethren generally resisted efforts to make them formally a religious order rather than a fraternity, and to cloister the sisters, but nevertheless became progressively more order-like.<ref name=post/>

[[Cardinal (Catholicism)|Cardinal]] [[Nicholas of Cusa]] may have been their pupil<ref>{{cite book|editor-last1=Dolan|editor-first1=John P.|title=Unity & Reform: Selected Writings of Nicholas de Cusa|date=1962|publisher=Univ. of Notre Dame Press|location=Notre Dame, IN|page=9}}</ref> and so became their staunch protector and benefactor. He was also the patron of [[Rudolph Agricola]] (Rudolf de Boer), who in his youth at [[Zwolle]] had studied under [[Thomas à Kempis]]; and through this connection the Brethren of the Common Life, through Cusa and Agricola, influenced [[Erasmus]] and other adepts in the [[New Learning]]. 

More than half of the crowded schools —(in 1500, [[Deventer]] had over two thousand students) were swept away in the religious troubles of the sixteenth century. Others languished until the [[French Revolution]], while the rise of universities, the creation of diocesan seminaries, and the competition of new teaching orders gradually extinguished the schools that regarded Deventer and Windesheim as their parent establishments.

=== Impact ===
A 2016 study in the ''[[The Economic Journal|Economic Journal]]'' finds that the Brethren of the Common Life "contributed to the high rates of literacy, to the high level of book production and to city growth in the Netherlands."<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Akçomak|first1=İ. Semih|last2=Webbink|first2=Dinand|last3=ter Weel|first3=Bas|date=2016-06-01|title=Why Did the Netherlands Develop So Early? The Legacy of the Brethren of the Common Life|journal=The Economic Journal|language=en|volume=126|issue=593|pages=821–860|doi=10.1111/ecoj.12193|issn=1468-0297|citeseerx=10.1.1.394.1221|s2cid=153827704}}</ref>