This chapter focuses on eremitism in the Low Countries, the delta region between the Seine and the Elbe where the great rivers flow into the North Sea. Politically speaking, it encompasses the present Northern France (medieval Flanders), Belgium and the Netherlands, and the adjacent areas along the Lower Rhine up to the Elbe in Germany. Numerous independent principalities and city republics operated here under the formal sovereignty of the French king or the German emperor. In socio-economic terms, they comprised the prosperous commercial centres of the Low Countries with their expanding urban culture and trail-blazing religious developments. The Beguine movement originated here as well as the Modern Devotion [Devotio Moderna] of the Sisters and Brethren of the Common Life, both with a preference for a non-monastic form of religious life often characterized as the mixed life. In cultural and religious terms, beginning in the thirteenth century, far more women were active here than anywhere else in Europe.

The example of Saint Martin

When Count Ansfried of Hamaland surrendered his title and family life and ascended at an advanced age to the Utrecht episcopal see in 995, he had a small monastery with a hermitage built outside of Utrecht on the Eem River, which he called the Hohorst or Heiligenberg. He was, in this respect, following the example of Martin of Tours, who had built a similar complex on the Loire in France. Ansfried (d. 1010) was consequently placing himself in the tradition of the famous Saint Martin, prototype of ascetic and eremitic Christianity in Western Europe and patron of the church of Utrecht (and the Hohorst monastery as well). A few centuries before Ansfried, the Flemish missionary Amandus (c.600–c.680) had done something similar. In his youth, Amandus made a pilgrimage to Saint Martin's grave in Tours and took a container of hallowed ground as a talisman for his further course in life. In imitation of Saint Martin, he allowed himself to be shut up as an anchorite in Bourges in order to prepare himself mentally for his ministerial task. After a trip to Rome, he then wandered around the lands of the Meuse and Scheldt rivers in order to organize Christianity in these regions. He founded monasteries and converted the people, sometimes to an asceticism as rigorous as he himself practised. The converts included Bavo, on whom I will focus below.