A blacksmith's son copied the Bible four times and wrote a devotional classic
Thomas à Kempis spent most of his long life in a Dutch monastery copying manuscripts and teaching novices. The booklets he wrote for those beginners became The Imitation of Christ, one of the most famous Christian devotional books, which Thomas More ranked among three books everyone should own.
He was born around 1380 in Kempen, in the Rhineland, with the surname Hemerken, sometimes given as Hammerlein and Latinised as Malleolus. His father Johann worked as a blacksmith and his mother Gertrud ran a school. The name history remembers simply means Thomas of Kempen, and he signed his own work Thomas Kempensis or Thomas Kempis.
In 1392 he followed his older brother, also called Johann, to Deventer in the Netherlands to attend its well-regarded Latin school, staying until 1399. There he met the Brethren of the Common Life, followers of Geert Groote's reform movement known as the Modern Devotion. His brother had meanwhile become prior of Mount St Agnes near Zwolle, a house of the Windesheim canons, and Thomas joined it in 1406. He took Holy Orders in 1413 and became sub-prior in 1429, just as a quarrel over the vacant bishopric of Utrecht led Pope Martin V to impose an interdict. The community went into exile until 1432, and Thomas spent part of that time in Arnhem nursing his brother, who died in November 1432.
Most of his days went on prayer, writing and copying. He transcribed the entire Bible at least four times; one copy survives at Darmstadt in five volumes. Charged with training novices, he produced four booklets between 1418 and 1427, later gathered under the title of the opening chapter. Between 1500 and 1700 England alone seems to have seen thirteen translations of the Imitation plus three paraphrases. His own handwritten manuscript of 1441 is kept in the Bibliotheque Royale in Brussels.
He died near Zwolle in 1471. A persistent tale claims that about two centuries later the Church refused to make him a saint because scratches were found inside his coffin lid, but there is little evidence either that he was buried alive or that such a discovery would have blocked canonisation. His remains have moved with the churches of Zwolle: a monument was dedicated at St Michael's in 1897, the shrine was relocated when that church closed in 1964, and again in 2005 to the Assumption of Mary church in the town centre.
Source: Thomas à Kempis
