Johannes Tauler
1300 CE–1361 CE · Cologne
Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–1361) was a Dominican friar and preacher active in the Rhineland, widely regarded as one of the most gifted vernacular mystics of the medieval Latin West. Trained in the tradition of Meister Eckhart — whom he likely encountered during Eckhart's Strasbourg period (c. 1313–1326) and possibly also at the Cologne studium generale — he delivered German-language sermons that guided lay people and religious women toward interior surrender (Gelassenheit, or self-abandonment to God) through purification of the soul rather than external observance alone. His surviving corpus consists almost entirely of sermons, which circulated widely in manuscript and influenced later mystical and devotional currents. Luther read and praised Tauler's sermons highly, and later Pietist writers drew heavily on his vocabulary of inner transformation, making him a significant bridge between medieval Dominican spirituality and early modern Protestant piety.
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CologneקלןRhineland (Germany)
What they did here
He likely studied at the Dominican studium generale in Cologne, where he would have encountered the intellectual legacy of Albertus Magnus and possibly Meister Eckhart, though the precise dates of his Cologne stay are uncertain and some scholars place his main Eckhart contact entirely in Strasbourg.
Cologne in this era
Under the Holy Roman Empire, Cologne's archbishops rose to prince-electors of the emperor, while the city became a scholastic powerhouse: Albertus Magnus taught here, his pupil Thomas Aquinas studied under him, and construction of the great Gothic cathedral began in 1248.
About Cologne
Cologne (Köln), a city on the Rhine in western Germany, had one of the oldest Jewish communities in the German lands, attested in Roman times and again from the early medieval period. It was the birthplace, around 1269, of Rabbi Jacob ben Asher (the Baal HaTurim), author of the Arba'ah Turim, who later emigrated with his father, the Rosh (Asher ben Yechiel), to Toledo in Spain.
In Cologne at the same time
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Johannes Tauler’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Johannes Tauler’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.