ECCARDO (ECKEHART, Aychardus). — Dominican scholastic and mystical preacher, born at Hochheim near Gotha ca. 1260, died between 22 February 1327 and 27 March 1329.
Descended from the nobles of Hochheim, E. became a Dominican at Erfurt and studied at Strasbourg and Cologne. Between 1290 and 1298 he was prior and vicar in Thuringia, and wrote the Rede der Unterscheidung. At the University of Paris he obtained the master’s degree (Meister E.), taught, disputed, and preached. First provincial of the province of Saxony in 1303, he was also appointed vicar of Bohemia by the General Chapter of 1307. Elected provincial of Germany in 1310 but not confirmed, he was sent back to Paris to teach there (1311–1313). Although E. devoted his best years to administration, he never ceased writing (Buch der göttlichen Trüstung for the queen of Hungary; Quaestiones, etc.) and preaching. This was his vocation. In 1313 he was in Strasbourg. Many of his sermons have been transmitted in «reportationes» by male and female listeners. The thought formed in the schools poured forth in sermons of high merit before the clergy, the people, the orthodox beguines, and especially before the religious communities, particularly the Dominican ones, which had seven monasteries in Strasbourg. He also travelled through other Alemannic
and Bavarian regions. Commissioned by the master general, in 1322 he visited the monastery of Unterlinden, a probable sign that he was still in Strasbourg. He subsequently lived in Cologne. In 1325 the General Chapter of Venice admonished certain German preachers to refrain from proposing themes liable to give rise to misunderstandings or errors. In 1326 the opposing party brought proceedings against E. before the archbishop of Cologne. Two commissioners, one of them a Franciscan, extracted 49 theses from E.’s writings and sermons, and on 26 September 1326 he submitted a justification. After a second list of 59 propositions of which he was accused, E. appealed to the Pope on 24 January 1327, and on 13 February, conditionally, recanted in the Preachers’ church at Cologne, then proceeding to Avignon, where a commission reviewed the theses extracted at Cologne (cotum Avenioneuse), and John XXII, although showing consideration for E.’s person, condemned, in the bull In agro dominico of 27 March 1329, 28 propositions in their objective sense, declaring 17 of them tainted with heresy and 11 ill-sounding or suspect (Denz-U, 501–29).
The German works are: the Sermons (110), the Treatises (18, including Rede d. Unterscheidung, Buch d. göttl. Trästung), the fragments (68 [69], Sprüche), edited by F. Pfeiffer (Leipzig 1857; reprint there 1924), by H. Büttner (2 vols., Jena 1917), by W. Lehmann (2 vols., Göttingen 1919), and by F. Schulze-Maizier (Leipzig 1936). There are also other editions of the Rede (Munich (1922), of the Buch (Berlin 1933), etc. In the edition of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, J. Quint has so far published one volume of sermons (Stuttgart–Berlin 1936). Cf. also Die deutschen V. lateinischen Werke, Untersuchungen, I, edited by J. Quint (there 1940), and A. Faggin, M. E., pp. 65–68, 373–77.
(from A.F.W. Jackson, Persia Past and Present, New York 1995)