Franz Pfeiffer (literary scholar)

Franz Pfeiffer (February 27, 1815 – May 29, 1868), was a Swiss literary scholar who worked in Germany and Austria.

In 1857, having established himself as one of the foremost authorities on German medieval literature and philology, he was appointed professor of these subjects at the University of Vienna, and in 1860 was made a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences.

Pfeiffer's most significant work is arguably the second volume of his Die deutschen Mystiker (German Mysticism).

In this volume Pfeiffer collected the surviving German texts of the 14th Century mystic Meister Eckhart, who was at that time largely forgotten.

[3] The early translators of Eckhart into English, Evans and Blakney, depended largely on Pfeiffer for their source material.