John Tauler

TAULER, John (Johannes). b. Strasbourg, ca. 1300; d. Strasbourg or Cologne, 15 June 1361. Tauler became a Dominican monk. He studied under the great teacher Meister Eckhart, and became renowned as a teacher and preacher, first at Strasbourg and then at Basle. His place of death is uncertain. He is normally thought of as one of the ‘Friends of God’, a name for some 14th-century mystics: Catherine Winkworth* described him as one of those who ‘spoke often of a mystical or hidden life of God in the soul, and the worthlessness of the creature and outward things’; she commended ‘their strong grasp of the truths, that an immediate and personal relationship may and ought to exist between each...