the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

CHAPTER 1
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DOCTOR TAULERS ANDECHTIGER LERER:
MEISTER ECKHART IN EARLY MODERN
EUROPE
Few readers open up a book with no preconceptions whatsoever, evaluating the
volume and its author purely on the basis of the content. The circumstances that led the
reader to pick up the book in the first place vary—the reader had heard other people
discussing the book, had been recommended it by a colleague, had seen it cited by a
respected writer—but even if the reader has never heard of the author in question, a
reader can gather a fair amount of information about what the book might contain before
even opening the cover: from the publishing house that issued it to the picture on the
cover, the size and quality of the binding, the person it was dedicated to, the person who
wrote the preface, the books it was next to on the shelf, the compilation it was part of and
so on. Likewise, there is much that a historian can glean about both a book from the past
and its earlier readers by recovering that same contextual information: asking who else
read that book, or commented on it, what the volume itself looks like, who published it
and why. This chapter investigates in what form and with what associations Eckhart’s
ideas circulated in the sixteenth century. Reconstructing how Eckhart’s image and
reputation has been construed from the fourteenth century to the twentieth century reveals
how his writings from the Middle Ages were read and understood generally in the early
modern period, and by Valentin Weigel in particular. In the case of Meister Eckhart,
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