Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St Agnes
The house chronicle of the monastery near Zwolle where Thomas à Kempis lived from about 1399 to 1471. It records the investiture of each brother, including his own in 1406, and a continuator adds a notice of his death.
The chronicle runs from the first gathering of brothers on the hill outside Zwolle to the death of the fourth prior, year by year, with a second part on events outside the house: the deaths of Ruysbroeck and of Geert Groote, and the consecration of the church at Windesheim in 1387. Thomas à Kempis enters his own investiture under 1406 in the same plain form as everyone else’s. Under 1471 another hand takes over, beginning with a notice of Thomas’s death, age and writings; the translator says that this continuation, which runs to 1477, stood in the first printed edition of 1621.
It is a domestic record and reliable for the house’s own dates. The letter on Windesheim translated in the same volume is a separate work by an old canon who says that he withholds his name; it is cited here for its account of the beginnings and for the phrase “the New Devotion”. See the Devotio Moderna and the Imitation of Christ.
Cited in
- 1384 to 1441, firm date