| The Brethren of the Common Life (BCL) were a religious community founded by Geert Groote in the city of Deventer in the Netherlands in the late fourteenth century. The BCL stimulated the accumulation of human capital through schools, libraries and the production of books and laid the intellectual foundation for Christian Humanism in the Low Countries and the rest of Northern Europe. This paper empirically investigates the long-lasting impact of the BCL on a range of economic and societal outcomes in the Low Countries. Our empirical estimates provide evidence that the BCL has contributed to the uniquely and early high rates of literacy in the Low Countries in the decades before the amazing development of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. In addition, we find positive effects of the BCL on early book production and on city growth in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Finally, we find that cities with BCL-roots significantly earlier joined the Dutch Revolt against the Habsburg Rulers. These findings are supported by regressions that use distance to Deventer as an instrument for the presence of BCL. |
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