Skip to content
Back to the Library

The Medieval Church · c. 1362

The Life of the Servant

Henry Suso · c. 1295–1366

Read elsewhere

What it is

A spiritual autobiography, partly shaped by a nun who took his confidences down without telling him, describing extreme self-mortification later renounced as misguided.

Why it lasted

The first spiritual autobiography in German, and a rare medieval account of a man repudiating his own asceticism as a mistake.

Where to read it

Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.

These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.

Read next

Close to this one