house in turn had originated as an extension of a religious movement contemporaries referred to as the New Devotion. This book, then, which translates for the first time the sayings and teachings of the Brothers and Sisters of the Modern Devotion, presents the context or “incubator,” so to speak, out of which The Imitation of Christ almost certainly was born. The very term Modern Devotion (the misleading translation of a Latin word [moderna] for “new” with the sense of “renewed” or “present-day”)