Heinrich Suso, Das Buch genannt Seuse.
Augsburg, Anton Sorg, 1482

First edition. Das Buch genannt Seuse contains the four principal works in German by Suso: his autobiography, ‘Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit’, ‘Das Büchlein der Wahrheit’ and a selection of his letters sent to and collected by a devoted follower, Elizabeth Stäglin and other nuns. Suso’s mystical theology is concisely summed up in the final chapters of his autobiography which record conversations with Elizabeth Stäglin. In defining God Suso employs the language and imagery of pseudo-Dionysius and Bonaventura: one of the names of God is good, the divine darkness is ‘itself the brightest of all brightness’, God is outside things as well as within all things. He also draws on the pseudo-Hermetic Liber de XXIV philosophorum as did Bonaventura and Eckhart, when he says: ‘God is a circular ring whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere’.

The iconography of the woodcuts follows the illustrations in the known 14th and 15th-century manuscripts of Das Buch genannt Seuse.