Kempis, THOMAS A, was so called from Kempen, where he was born in 1379. His family name was Hämerken (Latinised, Malleolus, 'Little-hammer'). He was educated at Deventer, and in 1400 entered the Augustinian convent of Agnetenberg near Zwolle, of which his brother John was prior. Here he took the vows in 1406. He entered into priest's orders in 1413, and was chosen sub-prior in 1429, to which office he was re-elected in 1448. His whole life appears to have been spent in the seclusion of this convent, where he lived to an extreme old age. His death took place in 1471, at which time he certainly had attained his ninetieth, and most probably his ninety-second year. The character of Kempis for sanctity and ascetic learning stood very high among his contemporaries, but his historical reputation rests almost entirely on his writings, which consist of sermons, ascetical treatises, pious biographies, letters, and hymns. Of these, however, the only one which deserves special notice is the celebrated ascetical treatise On the Following (or Imitation) of Christ, the authorship of which is popularly ascribed to him. In its pages, says Dean Milman, 'is gathered and concentrated all that is elevating, passionate, profoundly pious in all the older mystics. No book, after the Holy Scripture, has been so often reprinted, none translated into so many languages, ancient and modern,' extending even to Greek and Hebrew, or so often retranslated. At least eighty editions were printed between 1470 and 1500; and the total number of editions enumerated by Fr. Aug. de Backer (Essai Bibliog., Liège, 1864) was about 3000. Before his death in 1873 he had collected evidence of more than 3000 additional editions. The earliest English translation, by Dr Atkinson, canon of Windsor, was printed by Pynson in 1503. It is strange that the authorship of a book so popular, and of a date comparatively so recent, should still be the subject of one of the most curious controversies in literary history. The book, up to the beginning of the 17th century, had been ascribed either to Thomas à Kempis or to the celebrated John Gerson (q.v.), chancellor of the university of Paris, except in one MS., which, by a palpable anachronism, attributes it to St Bernard; but from that time another claimant has been put forward, Gersen, the so-called abbot of Vercelli, whose very existence has not been satisfactorily proved. His claim was strongly argued by Cajetan and many Benedictine writers, and later by M. de Grégory (Mémoire sur le véritable Auteur de l'Imit., 1830) and Renan, but the arguments against it of Father Eusebius Amort and Mgr. Malou (Recherches histor., Tournay, 3d ed. 1858) remain unanswered. These three competitors have divided the voices of the learned, not alone individuals, but public bodies, universities, religious orders, the Congregation of the Index, the parliament of Paris, and even the French Academy; and the assertors of their respective claims have carried into the controversy no small amount of polemical acrimony. Hilton, an English monk, has also been proposed as author; but the learned have now generally come to concede the honour to Kempis. The theology of the Imitation is almost purely ascetical, and (excepting the 4th book, which regards the eucharist, and is based on the doctrine of the real presence) the work has been used indiscriminately by Christians of all denominations. The most ancient perfect MS., written by Thomas's own hand, is in the Bourgogne Library at Brussels, and bears the date 1441, but we know that this was not the protograph MS., and indeed two MS. copies exist of 1425. We may therefore date the completion of the work between 1415 and 1424. An exact fac-simile was published at London in 1879, with an introduction by Charles Ruelens. Dr Carl Hirsche of Hamburg discovered that in this its original form the work was characterised by rhythmical periods, cadenced sentences, and frequent rhymes—a device not uncommon among mystical writers. He found also upon the MS. marks of a peculiar system of punctuation, employed not merely to mark the sense, but also to indicate these rhythms to a reader; and in 1874 he printed at Berlin an edition of the text in which these were set forth for the first time by a rearrangement of the matter in the paragraphs. The present division of the chapters into paragraphs was originally made by the Jesuit H. Sommalius (1599); the further division into verses was the work of the 17th-century editors. A new English translation, 'now for the first time set forth in Rhythmic Sentences according to the Original Intention of the Author,' was published in London in 1889, with a preface by Canon Liddon.
See Kettlewell, Authorship of the De Imitatione (1877) and his Thomas à Kempis and the Brothers of the Common Life (1882); Victor Becker, L'Auteur de l'Imitation (1883); Hirsche, Prolegomena zu der Imitatio (1873-94); L. Wheatley, The Story of the Imitatio Christi (1891). The translation, with introduction, &c., by Dr Bigg (1897), is based, like all English translations, on that of Anthony Hoskins the Jesuit (1568-1615), itself a modernisation of the older one by Richard Whytford (ed. 1520). See the bibliography in Wolfgruber's Gersen (1880).