Spirit was just then at its height. At Strassburg there were no less
than seven convents of Dominican nuns, for since 1267 the Order had
resumed the supervision of female convents, which it had renounced a
short time after its foundation. Many of Eckhart's discourses were
addressed to these congregations of devout women, who indeed were to
a large extent the backbone of the mystical movement, and it is
impossible not to see that the devotional treatises of the school
are strongly coloured by feminine sentiment. A curious poem, written
by a Dominican nun of this period, celebrates the merits of three
preachers, the third of whom is a Master Eckhart, "who speaks to us
about Nothingness. He who understands him not, in him has never
shone the light divine." These nuns seem to have been fed with the
strong meat of Eckhart's mystical philosophy; in the more popular
sermons he tried to be intelligible to all. It was not very long
after he took up his residence at Cologne that he was himself
attacked for heresy. In 1327 he read before his own Order a
retractation of "any errors which might be found" (si quid errorum
repertum fuerit) in his writings, but withdrew nothing that he had
actually said, and protested that he believed himself to be
orthodox. He died a few months later, and it was not till 1329 that
a Papal bull was issued, enumerating seventeen heretical and eleven
objectionable doctrines in his writings.

This bull is interesting as showing what were the points in
Eckhart's teaching which in the fourteenth century were considered
dangerous. They also indicate very accurately what are the real
errors into which speculative mysticism is liable to fall, and how
thinkers of this school may most plausibly be misrepresented by
those who differ from them. After expressing his sorrow that "a
certain Teuton named Ekardus, doctor, ut fertur, sacrae paginae, has