Tauler, JOHANN, German mystic, was the son of a wealthy citizen of Strasburg, where he was born about 1300. His education was entrusted to the Dominicans in Strasburg and Cologne. When Tauler was twenty-four years of age the clergy of his native city, where he then lived, were prohibited from performing the religious services in consequence of a papal interdict having been launched against Strasburg, because it took a different side from the pope in a disputed imperial election. Tauler, however, and his colleagues continued to officiate. But the heads of the order forbidding them to do so, the magistrates banished the Dominicans from the city. For some seven years or so Tauler found refuge in Basel, where coming in contact with the Friends of God, a sort of free association for deepening religious life, his views underwent a great change. Some ascribe this 'conversion' to Nicholas of Basel; others discredit the fact altogether; whilst others again admit it, but dispute the identity of the agent. At all events, from this time forward Tauler became the centre and source of the quickened religious life in the valley of the middle Rhine, his repute as an eloquent and earnest preacher spreading far and wide. His banishment over, he returned to Strasburg, and is believed to have stayed behind there during the Black Death, to minister to the sick and sustain the courage of the living. He died in 1361. Prior to his conversion Tauler seems to have been a disciple of Master Eckhart (q.v.), at whose feet he probably sat when a young student, and thus he belongs to the Mystics (q.v.). The change that took place in him at Basel turned his thoughts from speculative thinking to pious exhortation and practical doing; and it is this note of sincere practical piety that especially distinguishes his Sermons, which are reckoned amongst the finest in the German language. Another work of a more speculatively mystical tendency, Following in the Footsteps of Christ, is by some attributed to Tauler.
See K. Schmidt, Johann Tauler (1841); Denifle, Das Buch von geistlicher Armut (1877); Ritschl, in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte (1880); Miss Winkworth, Tauler's Life and Sermons (Lond. 1857).