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Thomas à Kempis

Thomas à Kempis

1380 CE–1471 CE · Kempen

Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471) was born in Kempen in the Rhineland and educated at the school of the Brethren of the Common Life in Deventer before joining the Augustinian monastery of Mount Saint Agnes (Agnietenberg) near Zwolle, where he spent nearly seven decades as a monk, priest, and prolific copyist. He is universally regarded as the author of The Imitation of Christ, one of the most widely read devotional works in Christian history. His life exemplifies the Devotio Moderna movement: an interior piety rooted in humble service, contemplative reading, and the renunciation of worldly ambition.

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Stop 1 of 31380–1392Birthplace, Early Childhood

Kempen

What they did here

Born around 1380 in this Rhineland town, from which he took the surname à Kempis; his father Johann was a blacksmith and his mother Gertrud ran a small school.

About Kempen

Kempen is a small town in the Viersen district of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, in the lower Rhine region northwest of Düsseldorf. Confirmed as a town in 1294, it belonged to the archbishops of Cologne until 1794. It is the birthplace of Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380-1471), who took his name from it and spent most of his life in a monastery near Zwolle; he is traditionally credited with The Imitation of Christ. It is distinct from the Polish town of Kępno, historically also called Kempen, where the biblical commentator Rabbi Meir Leibush Wisser, the Malbim, served as rabbi from 1845 to 1859.

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The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Thomas à Kempis’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(5)