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

Mit Recht der Meister genannt: Modern Eckhartbilder
Weigel’s writings, following his death, were occasionally transmitted alongside
Eckhart’s texts—or texts related to Eckhart’s ideas—in the seventeenth century. In one
case, the editor of one compliation gathered together Weigel-related material and
Eckhart-related material, publishing them together presumably because he felt them to be
related. In another case, a work on Gelassenheit by Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (a
Protestant theologian) was misattributed to Weigel and published under Weigel’s name at
the end of the seventeenth century. That Karlstadt’s work on Gelassenheit is published
under Weigel’s name with a different title suggests that Gelassenheit, a distinctly
Eckhartian concept, was linked to Weigel’s name to the extent that a work on the subject
was attributed to him, whether purposely or accidentally.
The first example of Weigel and Eckhart material being published together is a
Dutch edition of two works by Weigel that was published in Amsterdam in 1647,
translated by Abraham Willemszoon van Beyerland. 226 The first hundred pages of the
small book are taken up by the works advertised on the title page, Weigel’s Van de
Betrachtingh des Levens Christi and his Korte In-leydinghe Tot de Duytsche
226 Abraham Willemszoon van Beyerland (1586?-1648) was a wealthy and successful merchant, who took
an interest in mystical, hermetic and spiritual writings. He is chiefly known as a translator and publisher of
Jacob Böhme (and as a collector of Böhme manuscripts), but also translated Hermes Trismegistus (see
Chapter 3) and Weigel, among others. Both his first and second wives came from families involved in the
publishing industry (bookbinders and papermakers), whence his connection to editing and publishing.
Either through his reading interests or his commercial ones (Amsterdam being an important trading city),
he participated in an international network of like-minded readers from England to Germany. The child of
Protestant refugees from the Catholic city of Antwerp to (Protestant) Amsterdam, he served as an elder in
the Calvinist church, but his reading interests nevertheless encompassed orthodox and heterodox works;
from an inventory of his library, he owned several hundred titles by authors from Augustine, Boethius and
Eusebius to Calvin and Luther to Agrippa von Nettesheim, Sebastian Franck and Weigel. Frank van
Lamoen, "Mit dem Auge des Geistes: Hintergründe zu den Übersetzungen des Abraham Willemz van
Beyerland," and Govert Snoek, "Die Bibliothek von Abraham Willemsz van Beyerland laut dem Inventar
seiner Witwe," both in Jacob Böhmes Weg in die Welt: Zur Geschichte der Handschirftensammlung,
Übersetzungen und Editionen von Abraham Willemsz van Beyerland, 169-212 (Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan,
2007).
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