At a glance
- Age
- 91
- Born
- November 30, 1379
- From
- Kempen
- Nationality
- Burgundian Netherlands
Biography
The book that carries his name is The Imitation of Christ, and it remains among the most widely read Christian devotional works. Readers who encounter a line from it today are usually meeting a text written by a man who spent his life inside a religious community rather than in public argument.
He was a canon regular of the Augustinians, a Catholic order, and his name is really a description of where he came from: "Thomas of Kempen", after his home town of Kempen. He is variously described as German-Dutch, born in 1379 in what was then the Burgundian Netherlands, and he died in 1471.
Little else is claimed for him beyond that. His reputation rests almost entirely on the one book, which has outlasted its author by centuries and continues to circulate in quotation long after most readers have forgotten the fifteenth-century canon who put it together.
He was a canon regular of the Augustinians, a Catholic order, and his name is really a description of where he came from: "Thomas of Kempen", after his home town of Kempen. He is variously described as German-Dutch, born in 1379 in what was then the Burgundian Netherlands, and he died in 1471.
Little else is claimed for him beyond that. His reputation rests almost entirely on the one book, which has outlasted its author by centuries and continues to circulate in quotation long after most readers have forgotten the fifteenth-century canon who put it together.
