The collected Latin writings of the medieval devotional author
The Opera Thomae a Campis is a collected edition of the Latin works of Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471), the German-Dutch canon regular and priest associated with the Brethren of the Common Life and the monastery of Mount Saint Agnes near Zwolle. Such collections gather his devotional, ascetic, and biographical writings, which belong to the tradition of Devotio Moderna — the “Modern Devotion,” a movement of inward, practical piety that flourished in the Low Countries and the Rhineland in the late Middle Ages.
The works are chiefly religious and instructional in character: treatises, sermons, letters, hymns, and meditations aimed at fostering humility, self-knowledge, contempt of worldly vanities, the imitation of Christ, and the interior life of prayer. Thomas’s writings consistently stress the cultivation of virtue, the mortification of disordered desires, the patient bearing of adversity, and the soul’s progress toward union with God. Several of the treatises are cast as dialogues or counsels addressed to a fellow religious, and a number of them are biographical, including lives of members of the community and of Geert Groote, the founder of the movement.
The collection’s significance lies principally in its association with the Imitation of Christ, one of the most widely read devotional works of the Western tradition, whose authorship is traditionally — though not uncontested — ascribed to Thomas à Kempis. The Opera as a whole preserves the wider body of his spiritual writing and stands as a representative monument of late medieval devotional literature.
