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of Tauler’s sermons neither flew off the shelf nor were impossible to get rid of. Though,
again, the printer’s records are missing here, it has been determined that a normal print
run in the first quarter of the sixteenth century was about 1000 copies, so the four
printings of Tauler in various editions make for the existence of 4000 copies. 189 Only the
1521 and 1522 edition of Tauler from Basel contained the appendix of Eckhart sermons,
so it might be estimated that 2000 copies of Eckhart’s sermons (in printed, not
manuscript form) were circulating in German-speaking lands by 1522.
The original impulse behind the re-publication of Tauler’s sermons was not,
strangely, a specific interest in the content but rather in the form, the sermon collection
being a popular form that sold well, and book distributors stood to make a profit by
finding new preachers to edit. 190 The person behind the three re-publications of Tauler’s
sermons was the book distributor Johann Rynmann from Augsburg, and though he
mostly published scholarly editions of Latin texts (only eleven percent of books
commissioned by him are in German), 191 Tauler fit into Rynmann’s publishing program
by dint of having written sermons, and would therefore fit in alongside the other 100 or
so sermon collections Rynmann had edited. 192 Rynmann did not run a printing business
189 Otto, 41.
190 Hans-Jörg Kunäst and Brigitte Schürmann, "Johannes Rynmann, Wolfgang Präunlein und Georg Willer
- Drei Augsburger Buchführer des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts," in Augsburger Buchdruck und Verlagswesen:
Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 23-40 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1997), 26.
191 Hans-Jörg Kunäst, Brigitte Schürmann, “Johannes Rynmann, Wolfgang Präunlein und Georg Willer --
drei Augsburger Buchführer des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Augsburger Buchdruck und Verlagswesen:
von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, Helmut Gier, Johannes Janota, eds., (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
1997), 27.
192 As another measure of Tauler’s popularity in the early sixteenth century are the sales figures that exist
for other sermon collections that Rynmann commissioned. The sermon writer who sold the best is one
Pelbartus de Temeswar, who wrote in Latin and of whom Rynmann published 53 editions, followed by
Michael Lochmair (20), Paul Wann (20) and Michael de Hungaria (13). The only other collection of
sermons that Rynmann commissioned was by Johann Geiler von Kaisersberg, (1508), whose works sold
much better than Tauler’s such that a second printing followed only two years later, rather than 10 or 13 as
in Tauler’s case. That these authors are today all but unknown testifies to the reshaping of the canon of
German spiritual writing since the nineteenth century. Otto, 39-40.
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