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

himself, but rather cultivated partnerships with printers such as Johann Otmar in
Augsburg (who published the second edition of the Leipzig text in 1508) and Adam Petri
in Basel (who substantially revised the 1508 text, and added the Eckhart sermons, to
publish the Basel edition in 1521 and 1522). 193 Rynmann, for his part, sold the books he
had commissioned to be printed, distributing them through his far-reaching network of
sales contacts, which stretched as far as Cracow, and possibly into the Netherlands. 194
Such a large sales network meant that Tauler (and of course Eckhart) would not have
been limited to circles around Augsburg and Basel, but would have found their way to
German-speaking readers across Europe.
As for the actual readership of the printed Tauler editions, this, predictably, is
hard to determine exactly, since only a fraction of the printed copies survive. In the case
of the first Leipzig edition, over a hundred copies survive, but this is of a print run that
was estimated to be about 1000. 195 Nevertheless, most of the surviving copies belonged
to monastic orders, and only eleven of the 107 surviving printed copies that one historian
examined have ownership marks of non-monastic owners. 196 This does not necessarily
reflect accurately the composition of the group of sixteenth-century Tauler readers, since
manuscripts in monastic libraries had better survival chances than those in the collections
of private owners. Nevertheless the majority of readers were either monastic (or at least
those who had access to monastic libraries) or scholars. This is chiefly due to the price
tag attached to such a large volume. Though prices varied depending on the market, a
customer might have been expected to pay between two and three Gulden but possibly as
193 Otto notes that Rynmann was not responsible for the addition of the Eckhart sermons to the Tauler
edition, but attributes it instead to Petri’s own initiative. Otto, 40.
194 Kunäst, 26.
195 Otto, 42.
196 Ibid, 73.
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