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

of a respectable though not fanatical interest in Tauler from religious people both loyal to
the Roman pope and sympathetic to Luther’s reform movement. I will then turn to the
readers’ responses to the content of Tauler’s work at the end of this section.
There was still a significant interest in Tauler in the sixteenth century when the
Basel Tauler edition was produced, meaning that making a first printed edition of Tauler
in 1498 was only a small risk for the printer and publisher (Konrad Kachelofen from
Leipzig and Johannes Rynmann from Augsburg). 185 Tauler’s popularity at the time can
be deduced from the number of surviving Tauler manuscripts, of which more than half
were produced after 1450 (71 of the surviving 132). 186 Moreover, Tauler manuscripts
were quite well distributed over the entire German-speaking region by the fifteenth
century. The printed edition would even have appeared as a familiar format to those who
already knew Tauler’s work, since it was already circulated in manuscript form as large
collections of sermons. Unlike for Eckhart, as I described above, the manuscript the
printer used to prepare the printed edition of Tauler’s sermons is still in existence, and
contains the very same sermons in the same order and even includes what is now known
as the Meisterbuch, a biography of Tauler that is now known to have been written by
Rulman Merswin and attributed to Tauler; 187 only small changes were made to produce
the printed version. 188
As for the success of the first printed edition, although there are no records of the
number of copies, the book was popular enough to merit a second edition ten years later.
A gap of a decade between printings was not unusual, meaning that the Augsburg edition
185 Otto, 23.
186 Otto notes that this could be attributed the normal vagaries of transmission, or to the fact that the
fifteenth century saw a growth in manuscript production overall. Otto, 21.
187 Otto, 24.
188 Otto, 28.
71