Sources & editorial method

About this edition

This site is a bilingual reading edition of Meister Eckhart’s Middle High German texts, presenting the original-language text beside an English translation for close, attentive comparison.

A reading edition, not a critical edition. The purpose of the site is to make the texts readable and comparable. It does not attempt to establish a new critical text from manuscripts, record textual variants, or replace the modern scholarly editions.

Text basis

Sermons and numbering

The sermon numbers on this site follow the numbering used in Franz Pfeiffer’s nineteenth-century edition, Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts: Meister Eckhart (G. J. Göschen, 1857). The Middle High German sermon texts used in this project were transcribed from this Pfeiffer text and retained under the same sermon numbers.

This matters because Eckhart’s German sermons have been numbered differently by different editors. Modern scholarship commonly cites the critical Deutsche Werke (DW), associated especially with Josef Quint and later Georg Steer. A sermon number in the Pfeiffer sequence should therefore not automatically be assumed to be the same number in the modern DW/Quint sequence.

For that reason, the site labels sermon pages explicitly as “Pfeiffer Sermon” in the edition metadata.

Tractates

The tractates are kept in a separate sequence. Their chapter numbers belong to the tractate collection used for this project and are not sermon numbers. Thus a tractate chapter numbered XVII and a sermon numbered XVII are different texts and are treated as separate works on the site.

Editorial practice

How the texts are presented

The Middle High German wording is preserved from the project source transcription rather than modernized into contemporary German.
The English translation is aligned with the Middle High German paragraph by paragraph for parallel reading.
Where the English working file contains different paragraph breaks, paragraphs are regrouped only when the correspondence with the Middle High German text is clear; the translation itself is not silently rewritten for this purpose.
When a Latin incipit is explicitly present in the source, it is shown above the sermon text in both columns and is treated separately from the sermon’s body paragraphs.
Working notes, translation instructions, file labels, and other-language material that are not part of the Middle High German/English reading text are not reproduced on the reading page.
Sermons and tractates remain separate collections even when their numbering overlaps.

Reading interface

Parallel reading

Each text can be read in three modes: Side by Side, English Only, or Original Only. In the parallel view, corresponding Middle High German and English paragraphs are placed opposite one another. Longer texts are revealed in short reading blocks so that the two columns remain synchronized.

Reference

How to cite a text from this site

Until the site has a permanent public domain and final release date, a practical citation can identify the author, text, numbering system, and edition:

Meister Eckhart, “Sermon 40” (Pfeiffer 40), Middle High German text with English translation, Meister Eckhart — Contemplative Readings.

Once the permanent domain is established, the page URL and access date can be added. For scholarly cross-reference, readers should also consult the modern DW/Quint numbering where appropriate.

Bibliographic orientation

Source editions

Historical text basis used for sermon numbering:
Franz Pfeiffer, ed., Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts: Meister Eckhart, 1. Abtheilung. G. J. Göschen, 1857.

Modern critical edition for scholarly cross-reference:
Die deutschen Werke, edited by Josef Quint and Georg Steer, vols. I–V. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1936–2007.

The modern critical edition is listed here for orientation and cross-reference. The website does not claim to reproduce the DW critical text.