ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the specific efforts of Lutherans to keep the writings of Johannes Tauler in circulation during the century and a half after Luther's death and what those who perpetuated this process explicitly said to justify these efforts. Analysis of this group of writings should shed some more light on the way later Lutherans interpreted Tauler and on the extent to which they would have agreed with Luther's ultimately ambivalent assessment of the writings of this medieval mystic. There are a couple of factors that seem especially to have enhanced the reputation of Tauler among post-Reformation Lutherans. The full text of the Meisterbuch was published along with Tauler's sermons in all of the Lutheran editions of his works. Matthias Lauterwald pointed out where there were inadequacies, first in the theology of the layman who wrote the story of Tauler's life and then in Tauler's own writings.
