Aus dem Winkel in die Welt: Die Bücher des Thomas von Kempen und ihre Schicksale (review)

The first volume of Michael Joseph Pohl’s still standard seven-volume edition of the works of Thomas à Kempis first appeared in 1902. The city of Kempen sponsored a colloquium in 2002 to celebrate the centenary. The resulting volume, with fifteen essays by scholars from five countries, offers the best current research. Thomas (c. 1380?–1471), who was reared under the influence of the Devotio Moderna in Deventer and was a canon regular at Mount-Saint-Agnes outside Zwolle for sixty-five years, wrote nearly thirty little devotional works but became known mostly for four pamphlets compiled as The Imitation of Christ (c. 1420). This work, arguably the most influential and widely read Christian devotional from the late-fifteenth into the twentieth centuries, was contested in its authorship from its earliest years, its origins still poorly understood. This volume is the place to begin, complete with an informative closing essay on Pohl (1835–1922), a classicist and the director of gymnasia (including Kempen’s), who prepared this edition in his spare time and retirement. Four essays treat the fierce early-modern controversies surrounding authorship of the Imitatio. Four scholars take up its theology; three its early transmission in Dutch, German, and French respectively; five consider other works by Thomas, especially the Dialogus noviciorum (a key source of information about the early Devotio Moderna); and two the songs and hymns attributed to Thomas (about which there is even more lack of clarity than the Imitatio). The essays are of a high standard, especially those that analyze early manuscript and publication evidence, such as Werner Williams-Krapp’s on Upper German translations, Stefan Sudmann’s on the text of the Dialogus noviciorum, Thom Mertens’s on the Sermones ad novicios regulares, Ulrike Hascher-Burger’s on the hymns, and Gisela Kornrumpf’s on various lyrics set to music.

Most scholars have settled on Thomas and his Netherlandish milieu as responsible for the four books that compose the Imitatio, although whether he intended the four to circulate as a unit and his desired order of the works is still unclear. There are several reasons for confusion. The books often circulated independently and anonymously. They also represent refined compilations drawn from teachings fostered in the Devout milieu as much as original composition. By the late-fifteenth century, the work began acquiring other attributions, especially to Jean Gerson (d. 1431), the famed Parisian theologian and devotional writer, then to a fictive Italian abbot called Gersen. This took on a distinct nationalist air once the work gained prominence, wonderfully set out here for France by Deleveau, with a French paraphrase in verse, composed by Pierre Corneille in the 1650s and printed on the royal press. Still more strikingly, once scholars turned to the manuscripts themselves (some nine hundred from the fifteenth century) they found nearly thirty copies that precede those in Thomas’s own hand (1441)—a manuscript now in Brussels often called the Autograph. These points offer puzzles enough, but this volume suggests ways forward that are free of nationalist and religious agendas. Its editor, Nikolaus Staubach, places early-modern disputes about the Imitation’s authorship in context and also provides the key to understanding this work—that is, to perceive in Thomas a compiler but also a refined literary editor capable of putting his own stamp on these hundreds of rhythmic and assonant prose sayings.