Strasbourg appears as a center of Dominican activity and a meeting place for different forms of religious life. In the early fourteenth century, Meister Eckhart served there as vicar to the Dominican Master General, amid a network of convents and Beguine houses. The city also formed part of Henry Suso’s education and the intellectual world in which he encountered Eckhart.

Dominican and Beguine Communities

When Eckhart moved to Strasbourg, the city had seven convents of Dominican nuns as well as a number of houses of Beguines. Beguines lived religious lives without taking formal monastic vows: they could own property and, if they wished, marry. Some lived in small communities and others alone. Their relative independence and lack of formal structures made church authorities suspicious of them, but their presence gave Strasbourg a distinctive religious landscape alongside its organized Dominican institutions.

Eckhart’s Strasbourg Years

After serving as a provincial overseeing forty-seven Dominican houses in Saxonia and completing a further teaching term in Paris, Eckhart moved to Strasbourg to act as vicar to the Dominican Master General. The city placed him among communities of Dominican women and Beguines whose spiritual writing influenced him. His engagement with their tradition included the work of Marguerite of Porete and Mechthild of Magdeburg, connecting Strasbourg’s religious setting to ideas that crossed institutional boundaries.

Suso and the City’s Intellectual Network

Strasbourg was also one of the places where Henry Suso studied philosophy and theology. He later attended the studium generale in Cologne, and in both cities he would have met Eckhart, who became a major influence on him, although the details of their relationship are not known. Strasbourg therefore figures not only as a place of Dominican administration and women’s religious communities, but also as part of the educational network through which Eckhart’s influence reached a younger mystic.