The Rhine valley is also where a distinct strand of Christian mysticism developed, written in German as well as Latin and carried largely by people outside the universities.
Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of a house on the Rhine, recorded visions from 1141 in a series of illustrated books, wrote music for her own community, compiled works on medicine and the natural world, and corresponded with popes and emperors. Her authority was unusual for a woman of her period and she claimed it explicitly on the basis of the visions rather than of office or of formal learning.
Two centuries later Meister Eckhart, a Dominican who taught at Paris and preached at Cologne and Strasbourg, developed a theology of the ground of the soul and of detachment, much of it delivered in German sermons to lay audiences and to women's religious houses. A papal bull of 1329, issued after his death, condemned a list of propositions drawn from his work. His pupils Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso carried the same current into the following generation in a less speculative form, and the loose networks around them, called the Friends of God, spread it further among lay people.
The line runs on into the devotional literature of the later Middle Ages and into the Reformation's reading of it, since Luther published an anonymous text from this milieu, the Theologia Germanica, early in his career. Whether these figures are best read as one school or as separate people a modern category has grouped together is disputed.