by external practices. In this way, he was more of a proselytizer than his counterpart, Eckhart. Tauler returned to Strasbourg around 1343, but the following years brought various crises. Strasbourg experienced a devastating earthquake and fire in 1346. From late 1347 until 1349, the city was ravaged by the Black Death. It is said that when the city was deserted by all who could leave it, Tauler remained at his post, encouraging his terror-stricken fellow-citizens with sermons and personal visits. Tauler travelled fairly extensively in the last two and a half decades of his life. He made several trips to Cologne. A number of his sermons were clearly delivered there, as indicated by their survival in the Cologne dialect of Middle High German. A credible tradition suggests he visited John of Ruusbroec in Groenendaal at some point in the 1350s. He is credited with composing the words of the Advent song, Es kommt ein Schiff, geladen. The oldest existing text source is a manuscript dated before 1450, found in the Strasbourg Dominican convent of St. Nicolaus in undis, which Tauler was known to have visited frequently. There are also some stylistic similarities to his other writings. According to tradition, Tauler died on 16 June 1361 in Strasbourg. He was buried in the Dominican church in Strasbourg with an incised gravestone that still survives in the Temple Neuf. The well-known story of Tauler's conversion and discipline by "The Friend of God from the Oberland" cannot be regarded as historical. Sermons Tauler left no formal treatises, either in Latin or the vernacular. Rather, his oeuvre consists of eighty sermons. Tauler's sermons began to be collected in his own lifetime - three fourteenth-century manuscripts date from around the time of Tauler's return to Strasbourg after his exile in Basel. Tauler's sermons were printed first in Leipzig in 1498, reprinted in 1508 at Augsburg, and then again with additions from Eckhart and others at Basel (1521 and 1522), at Halberstadt (1523), at Cologne (1543), and in Lisbon (1551). A Latin translation was printed first at Cologne in 1548 and 1553. In the nineteenth century, editions were produced by Julius Hamberger (Frankfurt, 1864) and Ferdinand Vetter (Berlin, 1910, reprinted Dublin/Zürich, 1968). Tauler was famous for his sermons, which were considered among the noblest in the German language—not as emotional as Henry Suso's, nor as speculative as Eckhart's, but rather intensely practical, and touching on all