Meister Eckhart and Rhenish Christian Mysticism

Meister Eckhart (Eckhart von Hochheim, c. 1260–c. 1328) entered the Dominican order in Germany and rose to considerable institutional prominence within it, serving as vicar and provincial for Dominican houses in Saxony and Bohemia, and twice holding the prestigious Dominican chair in theology at the University of Paris (first around 1302–1303, then again around 1311–1313) — an appointment previously held by Thomas Aquinas, and one that situates Eckhart squarely within the same scholastic Dominican intellectual world that produced Aquinas's systematic theology, even as Eckhart's own preaching pushed toward a far more radical, apophatic mysticism. In his final years he taught and preached in Cologne, a major center of Rhineland religious life, delivering many of his German-language sermons to communities of Dominican nuns and lay religious women (Beguines), a pastoral context that shaped his characteristically direct, vernacular idiom even as his Latin academic works followed conventional scholastic form.