Thomas à Kempis

Thomas à Kempis (about 1380–1471), born Thomas Hemerken at Kempen near Cologne, was a German-Dutch canon regular and spiritual writer. Educated at Deventer in the school of the Brethren of the Common Life, the lay movement of the Devotio Moderna, he entered the Augustinian monastery of Mount St Agnes near Zwolle in 1399, was ordained in 1413, and spent seventy years there copying manuscripts, including the whole Bible four times, and writing sermons, lives of the movement's founders and devotional treatises. The Imitation of Christ, generally accepted as his, has been translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible.