Meister Eckhart and Thomas of Erfurt

Meister Eckhart and Thomas of Erfurt lived streets away from one
another. Thomas was the last great figure of the Modistae, the
speculative grammarians who were concerned with the relationship between
grammar and ontology, the structure of the sentence mirroring the
structure of the world. Thomas’ major work – the Grammatica
speculativa – was deeply influential in the medieval period. But
does Thomas’ geographical proximity to Eckhart suggest a concomitant
influence of modism on his thought? What of modism’s legacy after the
rapid demise of the grammatical theory in the early-mid fourteenth
century? The contributions to this volume deal with these matters, and
were originally presented at the ‘Meister Eckhart and Thomas of Erfurt’
conference at the Max-Weber-Center at the University of Erfurt, 14-15
November 2013.