of the thirteenth century. Both the male and the female branches of the order were subject to the Augustinian Rule, which was so vague as to provide little guidance for daily conduct. Both men and women therefore had sets of Constitutions which determined the expectations for members of the order and detailed their structures of governance. The Constitutions of the friars included procedures for enacting changes in the legislation, whereas the sisters had no such mechanism for adaptation. On the other hand, the friars were bound by Constitution and papal decree to Humbert’s Rite, whereas the sisters were given free rein, at least nominally. Similarly, the friars were subject to a strict curriculum and a hierarchy of schools, degrees, and privileges, whereas the sisters had no legislation regarding their education except that they must devote themselves to liturgical study. These were the standards and expectations for literacy in the service of liturgical piety to which the early sisters presumably were held and to which the Observant reformers wished to return.
In the next chapter, I turn to Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Seuse, two fourteenth-century friars who occupy key positions in this history of Dominican female spirituality, both by virtue of their role advising women during their lifetimes and through the avid reception of their work by the Observants. Both friars promote a form of spirituality that soars to mystical heights while remaining grounded in the practices of the order. What they describe in theory is portrayed in narrative examples by the contemporary sisterbooks, the subject of Chapter 3.
CHAPTER 2
Detachment, Order, and Observance in Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Seuse
Der sang us dem grunde der gienge gar hoch [The song from the ground would rise high indeed].
—Johannes Tauler
The Dominican friars Heinrich Seuse (1295–1366) and Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) both served in the vicariate of Alsace within the province of Teutonia. Seuse’s writings, especially his Latin treatise the Horologium sapientiae, enjoyed an extraordinarily broad circulation, both complete and in excerpts. A fairly large number of extant manuscripts (fifteen) contain Seuse’s complete Exemplar, a compilation of four vernacular works: the Vita, the Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, the Little Book of Truth, and a collection of edited letters. In contrast, Tauler’s thought survives exclusively in German-language sermons, possibly recorded by but certainly distributed to the women to whom he preached.1 Taken together, their works represent some of the main genres of spiritual writing received by late medieval Dominican women, including those that will concern us throughout this book: sermons, treatises, and exemplary lives.
Both Tauler’s sermons and Seuse’s devotional works were widely transmitted in female communities, especially within the Observance.2 They are both strongly attested within the convent library of St. Katherine’s in Nürnberg, in part thanks to the labors of the librarian Kunigunde Niklas. Niklas had been a member of the convent prior to the 1428 Observant reform, and her activities on behalf of St. Katherine’s are attested from 1436 when she first becomes visible as a scribe. Niklas copied more than thirty manuscripts before her appointment as librarian in 1455.3 Among the works she copied for her convent was Seuse’s Exemplar, which she entered into her own library catalog under the signature J II.4 As librarian, Niklas was also responsible for developing the community’s cycle of table readings, edifying texts that were read aloud to the assembled sisters during a meal. Although she did not herself copy the manuscript she used, Niklas incorporated all eighty or so Tauler sermons in E V (Nürnberg, Stadtbibliothek, Cod. Cent. IV, 29) into the yearly schedule.5 Kunigunde Niklas thus single-handedly assured that Seuse’s Exemplar was available to her sisters and that they would regularly hear Tauler’s sermons.
Scholarship on the fourteenth-century vernacular writings of German Dominican friars often conceives of such literature as combatting the immediate and corporeal feminine spirituality of Dominican women by imposing a male rationality. In a statement representative of this position, Werner Williams-Krapp writes that Seuse worked to convince Dominican nuns that “wild hallucinations achieved through rigorous asceticism are not to be understood as the consummation of spiritual perfection.”6 In other words, Williams-Krapp paints a picture of rational and prudent friars working to rein in the delusional visions of women spurred by bodily excess. Although returning a measure of value to embodied female devotional practices has proven a useful corrective in certain contexts, simply turning the paradigm on its head does not correct the problem. As Ulrike Wiethaus has compellingly argued, feminist approaches that celebrate the bodiliness of female spirituality still essentialize women and their engagement with Christian tradition and practice.7 As I show in the following chapter, the visions of the sisterbooks represent carefully constructed mosaics of spiritual meaning: literary lessons which, far from being “wild hallucinations,” in fact often teach obedience and devotion to the Office. In this chapter I approach the writings of contemporary friars not as a corrective measure aimed at reining in the sisters, but as a contiguous element that lays the conceptual and practical groundwork for a broader construction of German Dominican spiritual practice and convent life, including the complex negotiation of female liturgical piety.
Treating Tauler and Seuse together reveals that, despite generic differences in their surviving works and different emphases in their patterns of thought, both friars present the Dominican forma vitae as a devotional and ascetic exercise that fosters spiritual life. Adapting the philosophy of the condemned Dominican teacher Meister Eckhart, Tauler and Seuse posit a “ground” of the soul in or through which the human mind accesses divine experience. Detaching oneself from the world in a state of Gelassenheit in order to prepare for this experience represents the ultimate goal of their spiritual programs. Nevertheless, both men reject ascetic exceptionalism and insist that spiritual perfection can only be attained through orderly practice or, better, through the practices of the order. By submitting oneself to the regulations of the Dominican order, one learns to let go of one’s own will in Gelassenheit, such that only the prayers of the Office remain as expressions of self rising from the ground of the soul. Tauler’s ideal expressions of piety prove different from Seuse’s, and Seuse’s again from those of the sisterbooks, yet these very differences reveal the spiritual productivity of life under the Dominican statutes.
The Ground and Gelassenheit
Gelassenheit and its partner concept, the ground, constitute key terms for both Tauler and Seuse, as for their Dominican predecessor Meister Eckhart, and these ideas govern their devotional and spiritual programs.8 Since their liturgical spirituality is both founded in and aims back toward the ground of the soul, I must address these concepts first, building their devotional programs from the ground up, so to speak. These terms govern how Tauler and Seuse conceive the human relationship to the divine and the effectiveness of human activity, including the Dominican forma vitae and the Office. Using the concept of the ground, Tauler and Seuse outline a schematic theological anthropology that explains in philosophical terms how and why observance of the order’s regulations brings one closer to God.
Indebted to Neo-Platonic notions of emanation, the ground represents the part of the human person that shares in the divine being as it pours itself out into creation.9 Seuse famously depicts this dependence or identity visually in a full-page illustration of the cycle of emanation and return found in the earliest manuscript witness of the Exemplar. The divine ground, represented as a dark double circle, rests at the top left of the image. From this point a red thread traces stages in Christ’s life allegorized in poetic couplets as a spiritual progression. At each stage, the thread draws through a small double disk in the center of the figure’s chest, echoing the divine ground from which the thread originates.10
Whereas Seuse uses the term grunt to designate
