• 2016–2017: Voluntary Social Year (FSJ) in Sumba, Indonesia, with Redemptorist Volunteering Ministries

• 2017–2020 Bachelor’s degree: Catholic Theology and Philosophy at the University of Erfurt; bachelor's thesis entitled: „Die Suche nach dem Humanismus, ‚der die Menschheit aus der Nähe zum Sein denkt‘. Überlegungen zum Brief über den ‚Humanismus‘ von Martin Heidegger (1947)“, Qualification: Bachelor of Arts

• 2018–2019 Student assistant on the „Wissenstransfer“ project at the Faculty of Catholic Theology, University of Erfurt

• 2020–2025 Degree in Secondary School Teaching: Catholic Theology at the University of Erfurt, German and Educational Science at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena; final thesis entitled: „Heideggers Augustinus-Rezeption der 1920er Jahre“; qualification: First State Examination for the Teaching Profession

• 2021–2025 Research assistant at the Chair of Philosophy, Faculty of Catholic Theology, University of Erfurt

• 2025 PreDoc fellow at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, University of Erfurt

• Since 2026: PhD candidate at the Meister Eckhart Research Centre of the Max-Weber-Kolleg at the University of Erfurt, funded by the Cusanuswerk

Meister Eckhart as recorded by scribes in the late Middle Ages: the example of his sermon on the ‘Two Ways’ (John 14:6)

My research examines how Meister Eckhart’s texts were read, copied, edited and transmitted in the late Middle Ages. The focus is on a sermon on the biblical statement ‘I am the Way’ (John 14:6), which was published under the title In festo Philippi et Jacobi apostolorum, 1 May: ‘Ego sum via’.

For a long time, the sermon was attributed not to Meister Eckhart but to the slightly younger Dominican Johannes Franko of Cologne, and was understood not as a sermon but as a ‘Treatise on the Two Ways’. It was only in manuscripts discovered later that Eckhart was explicitly named as the author. At the same time, the text has been preserved in an unusually wide range of versions: to date, 25 manuscripts are known, some of which exhibit considerable linguistic, theological and substantive differences. A discovery from the year 2023 is particularly revealing: fragments from the University Library of Leipzig have enabled the sermon to be dated to the period between 1290 and 1310, making them the oldest known manuscript certificates of a Middle High German sermon by Meister Eckhart.

The various manuscripts show that the text was abridged, reworded, supplemented, anonymised or passed on under a different name. Accordingly, these variants bear witness to an active engagement with Eckhart’s thought and can reveal which theological aspects were of significance to different readers, and where his potentially challenging or theologically controversial statements were altered or toned down. My doctoral research is not primarily concerned with reconstructing Eckhart’s supposedly ‘authentic’ words, but rather with the question of what happens to his ideas when they are passed on by different people and communities. What theological emphases do the various adaptations place? What traces do the respective contexts of their origin and use leave behind? What role did women and laypeople in particular play within religious communities in the transmission and shaping of Eckhart’s thought? In this way, the work combines palaeography, textual criticism, the history of reception and research into late medieval spirituality.