Geert Groote

Geert Groote (1340–1384) was a Dutch deacon and reformer who founded the Devotio Moderna, a spiritual renewal movement emphasizing personal piety, humility, and interior conversion over scholastic abstraction. After a religious conversion in 1374 he gave over his family home in Deventer as a house for devout women — known as Master Geert's House (Meester Geertshuis) — and gathered around him a circle of clergy and laymen who became the Brethren of the Common Life. A deacon by ordination, he chose by humility never to seek priestly orders, and preached across the diocese of Utrecht under episcopal license until that license was suspended in 1383; he appealed to the pope but died of plague in August 1384 before any reply arrived. His disciples — most famously Florentius Radewijns, and through him Thomas à Kempis — codified his teachings and founded the Congregation of Windesheim. His movement's emphasis on vernacular devotional reading and accessible piety created the spiritual atmosphere that nourished Erasmus, influenced Luther, and shaped the broader late-medieval reform tradition.