Most studies of late medieval culture focus on the sources and seeds of changes that led to the Renaissance and Reformation. "Fifteenth-Century Carthusian Reform" refracts conventional views of late medieval thought through a lens provided by the life and writings of a traditionalist member of a contemplative monastic order that was beginning to open itself to urban and humanist activism. It presents the backward-looking meekness of traditional monastic "discretio" as a full-orbed "idea of reform" and a foil to a scholastic hermeneutic. Through the university and monastic career of Nicholas Kempf, an Alsatian Carthusian in rural Austria and Slovenia, the book explores the cultural orbit of the University of Vienna during the mid-15th century by considering pastoral, pedagogical and monastic reform and patristic and humanist rhetoric.