Franz Pfeiffer


Franz Pfeiffer, was a Swiss literary scholar who worked in Germany and Austria.

Biography

He was born in Solothurn as a Bürger of Bettlach. After studying at the University of Munich he went to Stuttgart, where in 1846 he became librarian to the royal library. In 1856 Pfeiffer founded Germania, a quarterly periodical devoted to German antiquarian research. In 1857, having established himself as one of the foremost authorities on German medieval literature and philology, he was appointed professor of these subjects at the University of Vienna, and in 1860 was made a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences.
In his later years he traveled regularly to Überlingen am Bodensee to take the waters at the city's spa. He died in Vienna.

Works

Pfeiffer's most significant work is arguably the second volume of his Die deutschen Mystiker. In this volume Pfeiffer collected the surviving German texts of the 14th Century mystic Meister Eckhart, who was at that time largely forgotten. This publication of the German Eckhartian corpus led to the modern revival of interest in Eckhart. Though there was subsequent dispute as to how many of the texts in Pfeiffer's edition are genuinely by Eckhart, his edition remains a classic reference, though it has been superseded by the critical edition begun in 1936 under the aegis of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and only now nearing completion. The early translators of Eckhart into English, Evans and Blakney, depended largely on Pfeiffer for their source material.
His own work:
He edited: