The words " contested by none " are perhaps stronger than one would nowadays care to use; but the matter is one which cannot be fitly discussed in a short introduction like the present. Those who are curious about it will find it exhaustively treated by Dr. M. J. Pohl, in an essay[1] published in 1895, and at pages 385 to 397 of his edition of the text.
I shall here take the question of authorship for granted, and shall confine myself to setting out a few facts about Thomas a Kempis which may possibly be of interest to those using a book so much more subjective in its form than the " Imitation "; and to a brief account of former translations of it into English.
Thomas a Kempis was so called from Kempen,[2] the place of his birth. His family name was
- ↑ 'Ueber ein in Deutschland verschollenes Werk des Thomas von Kempen " (Kempen, A. Wefers'sche Druckerei).
- ↑ Kempen (Rhein) is a small town, lying about fifteen miles north-west from Diisseldorf, in one of the patches of territory between the Rhine and the Meuse formerly belonging to the archiepiscopal principality of Cologne. It is now included in Rhenish Prussia, has a population of about six thousand souls, and is an important railway junction. "Kempen " and " Kempis " are variants of the same word. In Germany and Holland, during the Middle Ages, place-names ending in e and en were latinized by changing those endings into is. The is does not appear to have been inflected; and both in documents written in Latin, and in ordinary speech, either form, e.g. , " Kempen " and " Kempis," seems to have been used indiscriminately.
