Christian mysticism was a major force in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, reaching its peak in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Nevertheless, it continued to exert a strong influence on cultural life far into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the major landmarks of German mystical writing is the oeuvre of Jakob Böhme, a simple seventeenth-century shoemaker, whom his contemporaries and many intellectuals of the Romantic movement admired as the "Teutonicus Philosophus" (German Philosopher).

Böhme was born in 1575 in Alt-Seidenberg, south of Görlitz in Silesia; the precise date is unknown. His father, Jakob, and his mother, Ursula, were peasants who had achieved a stable economic position by the time Jakob was born. As a boy he claimed to have discovered a cave in which stood a cauldron filled with gold; afraid, he ran out of the cave, and he could not...