HEYNLIN, JOHANNES VON STEIN (*Johannes de Lapaide*). - Certosian theologian and scholar, born at Stein in Baden between 1430 and 1433, died at Basel on 12 March 1496. He first taught philosophy and then theology at Paris (1455-1465), at Basel (1465-67), and again at Paris (1467-1472). In 1474 he returned to Basel as a preacher, and in 1478 went to Tübingen as co-founder and professor of the new university; the following year he definitively abandoned university teaching to devote himself to sacred ministry. A famous preacher, he carried out his activity first at Baden-Baden and Bern, and from 1484 at Basel. His sermons are preserved in five manuscript codices in the University Library of Basel. Another fruit of these years of ministry, a small treatise on the Holy Mass written for rural parish priests (*Resolutorium di-biorum circa celebrationem Missarum occurrentium*), enjoyed extraordinary diffusion, being reprinted in 42 editions. In 1487 Heynlin entered the Carthusian monastery at Basel.
Heynlin’s place in the history of thought lies between scholasticism and humanism. As a philosopher he is still the typical medieval thinker, representing a moderate realism (he did not adhere, as was once believed, to ultra-realism); as a scholar he is considered one of the promoters of German humanism. Rudolf Agricola and Johannes Reuchlin were his disciples at Paris, and Heynlin himself authored several humanistic writings now forgotten. More important than his own literary activity are the editions of classical authors and Fathers of the Church that he supervised. Heynlin also deserves credit for introducing the art of printing to Paris by summoning German printers from Mainz. The first incunabula printed in Paris were edited by him, and even in the last years of his life he acted as advisor and collaborator to the Basel publisher Johannes Amerbach, once his pupil at Paris.