Johannes Tauler
1300 CE–1361 CE · Strasbourg
Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–1361) was a Dominican friar and preacher active in the Rhineland, widely regarded as one of the most gifted vernacular mystics of the medieval Latin West. Trained in the tradition of Meister Eckhart — whom he likely encountered during Eckhart's Strasbourg period (c. 1313–1326) and possibly also at the Cologne studium generale — he delivered German-language sermons that guided lay people and religious women toward interior surrender (Gelassenheit, or self-abandonment to God) through purification of the soul rather than external observance alone. His surviving corpus consists almost entirely of sermons, which circulated widely in manuscript and influenced later mystical and devotional currents. Luther read and praised Tauler's sermons highly, and later Pietist writers drew heavily on his vocabulary of inner transformation, making him a significant bridge between medieval Dominican spirituality and early modern Protestant piety.
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StrasbourgשטרסבורגFrance
What they did here
Tauler was born in Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) and entered the Dominican order there around age fifteen to eighteen; he encountered Meister Eckhart during Eckhart's Strasbourg residency (c. 1313–1326).
About Strasbourg
Strasbourg is the principal city of Alsace in northeastern France, on the Rhine. A free imperial city from the 13th century, it became French in 1681, was German again from 1871 to 1918, and is today a seat of the European Parliament and the Council of Europe. In the 14th century it was a centre of German mysticism, where the Dominicans Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler preached, and in the 16th a centre of the Protestant Reformation under Martin Bucer, with John Calvin among its figures; its university grew from a gymnasium founded in 1538. The medieval Jewish community was destroyed in the massacre of 1349; Jewish life later revived, and modern Strasbourg is an important centre of French Jewry.
In Strasbourg at the same time
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The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Johannes Tauler’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
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