Gerardi Magni Opera Omnia, Pars II, I: Sermo ad clerum Traiectensem de focaristis ed. by Rijcklof Hofman (review)

This critical edition of Gerard Grote’s Sermo ad clerum Traiectensem de focaristis, together with a number of other pieces on clerical celibacy, is part of a planned multivolume collection in the CCCM of the works of this late-fourteenth-century Dutch churchman (1340–84). Particularly interested in canon law, he trained at the University of Paris, where he received a master of arts degree. He was a gifted preacher, evident in the Sermo that he delivered to a synod of churchmen at Utrecht in 1383. He is probably best remembered for laying the foundations for the establishment of the Brethren of the Common Life and subsequently the Windesheim congregation identified with Thomas à Kempis whose Imitation of Christ was so influential in the late Middle Ages and helped to establish the basis for the Protestant Reformation. Thomas à Kempis also wrote a valuable biography of Gerard Grote.

The sermon against the focarists—the word from the Latin focaria (hearth), hence churchmen living in a disreputable fashion with their housekeepers—is a very strong defense of clerical celibacy. This lengthy work is found in almost thirty manuscripts, which demonstrates its popularity and importance. The piece is in twenty-six segments or chapters, each seeking to reprimand and correct those clerics who failed to lead a chaste life as well as drawing upon the authority of earlier authors such as the Fathers and later authorities, in particular St. Thomas Aquinas. For Grote, the focarists brought scandal to the Church and set poor examples for their fellow Christians. Grote viewed their actions as contributing to the suffering of Christ and a sign that he and his contemporaries were living in the end times—not surprising in a world undergoing serious global cooling and the seeming omnipresence of the Black Death, the illness that had caused the deaths of Grote’s parents and killed Grote himself in 1384.

The edition of this collection has special strengths. The several brief additional pieces, also very much focused on clerical celibacy, served Grote and now his modern reader as a means of underlining the main points and to do further battle with the focarists and those who felt he went too far in his attacks. They gave him the opportunity of clarifying and elaborating on such controversial points as whether those who attended the services of notorious focarists were committing mortal sin. Like the Sermo, these pieces are well edited and based on many manuscripts. They prepare the way for the editions of the remaining writings of Grote, works that have not yet received as much attention as they deserve. The one shortcoming for those who are being introduced to the writings of Grote through this edition is that not enough is presented in the introduction on Grote’s life, a deficiency that one hopes will be rectified in the volumes in the collection to follow.

Yet the otherwise excellent introduction does make a strong case for why celibacy was viewed as so important for clerics by many in the fourteenth century, just as it is in the twenty-first century. Many recent works are cited to demonstrate this continuing interest in the topic. This book should greatly contribute to keeping the subject in the forefront of church scholarship and, with the later books in the collection, to offering a great appreciation of this figure in the development of the spirituality of the later Middle Ages and the Reformation.