Das Buch von geistlicher Armut: Überlieferung, Armutskonzept, Rezeption

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ‚Book of Spiritual Poverty‘ (‚Buch von geistlicher Armut‘), an anonymous German mystical treatise from the 14th century. After an introduction, the second chapter reviews previous scholarship on the book and identifies research desiderata. In the third chapter, the surviving manuscripts are recorded and described in detail where scholarly descriptions are not yet available. In the fourth chapter, text-critical methods are used to prove the relationship between the surviving manuscripts. A combination of stemmatic, linguistic, and provenance data is used to map the spatio-temporal distribution of the book. Its transition from manuscript to print in the 17th century is traced, outlining the reasons and actors behind its erroneous attribution to Johannes Tauler. The fifth chapter examines the book’s holistic concept of poverty, both internal and external, which the author of the treatise developed in contrast to Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler. In the sixth chapter, an investigation into the reception of the book by the Franciscan Marquard of Lindau and in the anonymous Dominican ‚Compilatio Mystica‘ (‚Lehrsystem der deutschen Mystik‘) describes how the book was used in Franciscan and Dominican contexts.