Thomas à Kempis

Thomas à Kempis was a canon regular of the Congregation of Windesheim, in the Low Countries, who spent seventy years in the monastery of Mount St Agnes copying manuscripts and writing devotional works. The Imitation of Christ, generally though not universally attributed to him, appeared around 1418 and is the most read Christian book after the Bible: four short books of counsel on the inner life, contempt of the world, the consolation of Christ and the sacrament, in a plain Latin that asks what it profits to dispute learnedly about the Trinity if one lacks humility. Ignatius, Wesley and George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver all read it.