Against the influences of a French-speaking Court and its literary mouthpieces, the native language and literature had to rely upon a power of resistance strengthened by movements springing from the heart of the people. Thus, though the so-called Chambers of Rhetoric, whose members went by the name of Rederijlcers, derived their title from France, the institution itself was clearly a continuation or renewal of the old confraternities or guilds devoted to the performance of religious plays which flourished in various parts of the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Rederijkers, whose activity , cannot safely be asserted to have begun much before the fifteenth century, abandoned the domain of ecclesiastical tradition, thereby rendering collision with the Church inevitable sooner or later, and, as at the .same time the critical spirit asserted itself and the influence of the Renaissance enlarged the choice of materials, in their dramatic allegories or moralities (spelen van zinne) paid increasing attention to the treatment of their subjects and the form of their plays. Connecting their performances with the festivals that formed so material a part of the popular life of the Netherlands, they at the same time more and more acquired the character of literary associations whose activity extended to a wide variety of forms of composition. The most ancient of the Belgian Chambers, the Alpha et Omega of Ypres, seems to date from a time rather before the beginning of the fifteenth century; the famous In liefde bloeyende of Amsterdam was not instituted till 1517. Their number ultimately grew to an extraordinary extent, more especially in the Southern Netherlands; and the elaborate arrangements for establishing an organic union among them culminated in the meeting of deputies of all the Chambers at Malines in 1493 on the summons of Philip the Fair, and the setting-up in 1503 of a supreme Chamber at Ghent. But this late effort of a centralising policy was vehemently opposed, and its practical result was small. The Reformation found the Chambers instinctively sensitive to impulses moving the heart of the people-with what consequences is well known.
The popular religious movements noticeable in the Netherlands up to the close of the fourteenth century had on the whole remained ominously out of touch with the organisation of the Church. On the other hand, the Beguines and Beghards and Lollards had little or nothing to say against the doctrines of the Church of Rome; and neither the Wicliffites nor afterwards the followers of Hus seem to have attempted any propaganda in the Low Countries. The beginnings there of mystical speculation, of which the revered Johannes Rusbroek, born near Brussels in 1283, can in his age hardly have been a solitary representative, may possibly be traceable to the teachings of the “Master” Eckhart at Cologne. To Rusbroek’s teachings both Tauler and Gerard Groote were listeners; they became a profound source of personal inspiration to many generations; nor has their echo died out to this day. To Geert (Gerard) Groote and his friend Florentius Radevynszoon, unlike him an ecclesiastic by profession, was due the establishment of ihefrater-huis at his native town of Deventer, which became the model of a series of similar foundations, intended as the homes of pious followers of God f resolved to lead a common life of prayer and labour, unencumbered by any hierarchical organisation and free from any system of irrevocable vows. A happy accident suggested that some of the young members of the Deventer settlement should contribute towards its support by clubbing together their earnings as copyists of manuscripts of the Scriptures and the Church Fathers, to which work they had as pupils of the Latin school in the town been encouraged by Groote. Hereby he had from the very outset of his endeavours blended the pursuit of learning and the furtherance of education with a life of piety and devotion. While extending and consolidating the system of ihefrater-htdzen, Florentius also carried out a cherished earlier design of his friend by the foundation, at Windesem near Zwolle, of a convent of canons regular. The half-century of the reigns of Philip and Charles witnessed a continuous extension in almost every part of the Netherlands, as well as in many districts of Northern Germany, both of the Houses of the Brethren of the Common Life and of the convents called the Windesem Congregations. The Church had come to recognise the agency of the Brethren as useful and praiseworthy; among those who extolled their labours was the Minorite Johannes Brugmann, the greatest popular preacher of his age in the Netherlands, and they were favoured by Duke Philip’s brother, Bishop David of Utrecht.
The value of the Brethren’s labours in the transcription of manuscripts has not been overestimated; but these labours belonged to a period that was passing away, and were only slightly supplemented by use of the new invention of the printing-press. On the other hand the work of education had always formed a chief purpose and essential part of the existence of the fraternity. The very large numbers of scholars attending its schools signally contributed throughout the Netherlands to lay the foundations of an enduring literary culture, and the fact that the teaching and training of these scholars was everywhere impregnated with the spirit of religious devotion determined the significance, to the most illustrious as well as to the humblest of them, of the advance of the New Learning. They met it less in the spirit of an enthusiastic humanism than in that of a steady demand for serviceable lore,, such as already gives so much substance to the writings of Cardinal Cusanus, a pupil of Deventer in its earlier days.
But a new educational epoch began with Alexander Hegius, who in 1474 was appointed head of the school at Deventer, and died near the close of the century, leaving behind him nothing but his clothes and his books, and a name which may fairly be called that of one of the great schoolmasters of the world. The list of the scholars trained at Deventer by him, or in his time, and that of his Paris fellow-student Badius Ascensius (Bade of Asche), includes, besides its chief and incomparable glory, the name of Erasmus, those of Conrad Mutianus, the pride of Erfurt in her brightest days, and Hermann von dem Busche, whom Strauss calls “the missionary of humanism.” Johannes Sintius (Sin-theim), who taught with Hegius at Deventer and was himself a member of the Brotherhood, rendered a signal service to education in the Netherlands and in Germany by the successful revision of the Latin grammar which had held its own for centuries. But the schools of the Brethren were not seminaries of that narrower humanism which made the study of the classical tongues the sole method and all but the supreme object of education. They encouraged the reading of the Bible and the use of the service-books in the vulgar tongue, cherished the careful use and even the study of the vernacular, and thus brought about the beginning of a new educational movement which on the Upper Rhine was to lead to results such as it could hardly expect to command on the Lower. Many links connect the labours of the Brethren and the great movement which in the fifteenth century strove to quicken the religious life of the German people by bringing learning and education, and literature and art, into living harmony with it. Such a link may be found in the life of Rudolf Agricola, who died in 1485, and, although apparently not a pupil of the Brethren, was a native of the neighbourhood of Groningen, where one of their seminaries was placed. The last years of his life were spent at Heidelberg and Worms. He was a man of three tongues; but it was in theological rather than in philological study that he found the crown of his labours.
Of a very different character were the relations, in the Netherlands, between the Renaissance and University studies. The complete separation of academical from municipal government at Louvain, and the special attention devoted there to legal studies intended to prepare for the service of the central government, went some way towards estranging that University from popular and provincial interests; but the part which she was long to play in the history of the intellectual culture of the country