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Sources and Research on the History of German Mysticism

Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte der deutschen Mystik

1902·216 pages PDF (4.8MB) Source

Source collection of late-medieval Low German mystical and devotional texts edited by Rudolf Langenberg from manuscripts in Cologne, Münster, Hannover, and Wolfenbüttel. Its opening text is a Low German reconstruction of Geert Groote's lost treatise De simonia ad beguttas — a polemic against the buying and selling of admission to beguinages — followed by Low German hymns, the Marienklage of Dietrich Vrye, a fifteenth-century Laienregel, a treatise on spiritual unchastity (De weltliche Minne), and a Decalogue exposition from the Groote manuscript at Münster, together with Langenberg's notes and a concluding study on the relation of Low German mysticism to Meister Eckhart. Published at Bonn by P. Hanstein's Verlag.

Author

Geert Groote

Geert Groote

Gerardus Magnus

1340–1384

Readings

On Simony, to the Beguines

De simonia ad beguttas

Geert Groote's treatise De simonia ad beguttas (c. 1380), addressed to the beguines on the question of whether it is simony to buy a place or prebend in a beguinage. Groote answers that, where any spiritual good — admission to the community, the habit, share in prayers, or the right to common life under a rule — is attached to the place, the purchase is indeed simony; he then unfolds the doctrine through a series of distinctions on what constitutes a spiritual good, the difference between buying the thing and buying the means to it, and the legal and moral remedies. The treatise survives in eastern Middle Dutch in fifteenth-century manuscripts from the IJssel and Cologne region, edited here by Rudolf Langenberg.

Geert Groote Geert Groote·1380·De simonia ad beguttas·p. 3–33